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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

The amount of things LLMs can do is insane.

It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

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This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop.

They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.

We're waaay past the era when getting funded meant your idea had any promise at all.

It looks like the company (Cognition) is actively hiring (20+ job openings last I checked). That doesn't sound like a "flop" to me...

Think about: why would they be hiring actual human beings if Devin actually works? Seems like the purest example of "dogfooding"...

This generally just keeps being the "the Emperor has no clothes" moment for all these AI bull companies.

Microsoft just replaced their native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. Highly ironic.

Obviously the native version should run much faster and will use less memory. If Copilot (via either GPT or Claude) is so godlike at either agentic or guided coding, why didn't they just improve or rewrite the native Copilot application to be blazing fast, with all known bugs fixed?

When you think about it, every job opening is a flop in that sense.

WeWork had 12,500 employees at its peak.

And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.

What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can?

They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)

My current way of thinking about LLMs is "an echo of human intelligence embedded in language".

It's kind of like in those sci fi or fantasy stories where someone dies and what's left behind as a ghost in the ether or the machine isn't actually them; it's just an echo, an shallow, incomplete copy.

Just dust and echoes.

Residue ;)

> some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.

I don't think it's unexplored at all, this is basically what information theory is all about. At some level, it becomes incompressible....

Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before.

What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.

People assume training on past data means no novelty, but novelty comes from recombination. No one has written your exact function, with your exact inputs, constraints, and edge cases, yet an LLM can generate a working version from a prompt. That’s new output. The real limitation isn’t novelty, it’s grounding.

Synthesis is different than genesis.

Just because there are lots of tasks which can be accomplished without the need for anything novel doesn't mean LLMs can match a human. It just means humans spend a lot of time doing some really boring stuff.

That’s only part of it. The true intelligence is knowing what to recombine, and this is where AI falls short.

I hear this constantly. Can you produce something novel, right here, demonstrably, that an LLM couldnt have produced? Nobody ever can, but it’s sure easy to claim.

I'm going to assume you mean this seriously, so I will answer with that in mind.

Yes, I can. - I can build an unusual, but functional piece of furniture, not describe it, not design it. I can create a chair I can sit on it. An LLM is just an algorithm. I am a physically embodied intelligence in a physical world.

- I can write a good piece of fiction. LLMs have not demonstrated the ability to do that yet. They can write something similar, but it fails on multiple levels if you've been reading any of the most recent examples.

- I can produce a viable natural intelligence capable of doing anything human beings do (with a couple of decades of care, and training, and love). One of the perks of being a living organism, but that is an intrinsic part of what I am.

- I can have a novel thought, a feeling, based on qualia that arise from a system of hormones, physics, complex actions and inhibitors, outrageously diverse senses, memories, quirks. Few of which we've even begun to understand let alone simulate.

- And yes I can both count the 'r's in strawberry, and make you feel a reflection of the joy I feel when my granddaughter's eyes shine when she eats a fresh strawberry, and I think how close we came to losing her one night when someone put 90 rounds through the house next door, just a few feet from where her and her mother were sleeping.

So yeah, I'm sure I can create things an LLM can't.

So the only thing I am seeing here is physical or personal (I have no idea how you feel or what your emotions are. You are a black box just as an LLM is a black box.)

The only thing you mentioned is the fan fic and I would happily take the bet that an LLM could win out against a skilled person based on a blind vote.

Me personally? No. Us collectively? Absolutely.

Was an individual mind responsible for us as humanity landing on the moon? No. Could an individual mind have achieved this feat? Also no.

Put differently, we should be comparing the compressed blob of human knowledge against humanity as a collective rather than as individuals.

Of course, if my individual mind could be scaled such that it could learn and retain all of human knowledge in a few years, then sure, that would be a fair comparison.

I want to see an LLM create an entirely novel genre of music that synthesizes influences from many different other genres and then spreads that genre to other musicians. None of this insulated crap. Actual cultural spread of novel ideas.

take my pound of flesh.

Highlife music

The hype has gotta keep going or the money will dry up. And hype can be quantified by velocity and acceleration, rather than distance. They need to keep the innovation accelerating, or the money stops. This is of course completely unreasonable, but also why the odd claims keep happening.

Why would the money dry up when we have companies willing to spend $1000/developer/month on AI tooling when they would have balked at $5/u/mo for some basic tooling 2-3 years ago?

First in some cases it is more than $1000/dev/month.

Those companies spending 1000+/developer are doing it with the same hope that at some point those $1000/month will replace the developer salary per month. Or because by doing so more investors will put more money into them.

Take away the promise of AI replacing developers and see how much a company is willing to pay for LLMs. It is not zero as there are very good cases for coding assisted by LLM or agentic engineering.

Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.

>Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas.

That's right, but there's more. When you think about the cost of compute and power for these LLM companies, they have no choice. It MUST be a multi-trillion-dollar idea or it's completely uninvestable. That's the only way they can sucker more and more money into this scheme.

Perhaps not. But I find myself using LLMs instead ofba search engine like Google.

This does have value.

To you, yes, but the compute to return that search costs them far more than a simple search query and on top of that it's hard to monetize.

It doesn't, most of research is cached and most of the inference which is returned is also cached unless you are always asking unique things

This is literally the first time I've heard this. What is your source? I can type the exact same query three times and though the general meaning may be the same, the actual output is unique every single time. How do you explain this if it's cached?

I don't know about OpenAI, but Nvidia's valuation seems more justifiable based on their actually known revenue and profit, and because it's publicly traded.

Though if the bubble(?) bursts and Nvidia starts selling fewer units year-over-year, that could be problematic.

for example?

Claiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1]

Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice. [2]

Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-o...

[3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer...

Claiming they will replace software engineers in 6-12 months, every 6 months [4]

[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-predicts-ai-mod...

so you're saying Ai can do all those things?

or that you can't read that GP was talking about what Ai CAN do?

Medical...

Well, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff of science fiction.

they passed, sure

how do you market that as a product that is needed by other people?

there are already companies that advertise Ai date partners, Ai therapists and Ai friends - and that gets a lot of flame about being manipulative and harmful

I've been pushing Opus pretty hard on my personal projects. While repeatability is very hard to do, I'm seeing glimpses of Opus being well beyond human capabilities.

I'm increasingly convinced that the core mechanism of AGI is already here. We just need to figure out how to tie it together.

Can you give an example of something beyond the human level you’ve experienced?

Generating 3000 lines of esoteric rendering code within minutes, to raster generative graphics of anything you can imagine and it just works? From natural language instructions. Seriously think about that my dude.

That is amazing but this specific example doesn’t seem all that different from what a compiler does just another level of abstraction higher

But that's not what AGI is. Restructuring data the way they do is very impressive but it's fundamentally different from novel creativity.

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