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Comment by wood_spirit | Hacker News Reader

It’s not. LLMs are just averaging their internet snapshot, after all.

But people want an AI that is objective and right. HN is where people who know the distinction hang out, but it’s not what the layperson things they are getting when they use this miraculous super hyped tool that everybody is raving about?

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The etiquette, even at the bigtech place I work, has changed so quickly. The idea that it would be _embarrassing_ to send a code review with obvious or even subtle errors is disappearing. More work is being put on the reviewer. Which might even be fine if we made the further change that _credit goes to the reviewer_. But if anything we're heading in the opposite direction, lines of code pumped out as the criterion of success. It's like a car company that touts how _much_ gas its cars use, not how little.

Review is usually delegated to an AI too

By now, a few years after ChatGPT released, I don't think anyone is thinking AI is objective and right, all users have seen at least one instance of hallucination and simply being wrong.

Sorry I can think of so many counter examples. I also detect a lot of “well it hallucinates about subject X (that the person knows well, so can spot the hallucination)” but continue to trust it on subjects Y and Z (which the person knows less well so can’t spot the hallucinations).

YMMV.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-Michael Crichton

Sure, Gell-Mann amnesia exists, but remember that its origin is actually human, in the form of newspaper writers. So, how can we trust humans the same way? In just the same way, AI cannot also be fully trusted.

The current way of doing AI cannot be trusted.

that doesn’t mean the future won’t herald a way of using what a transformer is good at - interfacing with humans - to translate to and interact with something that can be a lot more sound and objective.

You're falling into the extrapolation fallacy, there is no reason to think that the future won't have the same issues as today in terms of hallucinations.

And even if they were solved, how would that even work? The world is not sound and objective.

It’s a thought experiment. I am not saying I believe it will happen.

But right now there are lots of domains where current lauded success is in treating something objective - like code - as tokens for an llm.

We could instead explore using transformers to translate human languages to a symbology that can be reasoned about and applied eg to code.

It’s the talk of conferences. But whether it works better than we have today, or whether it aligns with the incentives or the big players, is another matter

There are a lot of binary thinkers on HN, but they shouldn’t make up a majority.

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