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Comment by cryptopian | Hacker News Reader

I see a few comments on here that read "why is everyone so ungrateful and hysterical about this exciting new technology?" And I don't understand why people are surprised by this. All a young person is going to hear is "We're disrupting the world, automating employment opportunities, automating art and other leisure, innovating misinformation vectors, and also we think this technology might doom humanity. I know we're from the same kinds of companies as the social media giants you already distrust, but still pls give billions of dollars thank"

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Silicon Valley has really screwed up here. They are so obsessed with their own importance (this kit is so powerful it can destroy the world!) they have failed to sell/inform the average joe.

It’s a tool. And the next generation probably benefits from learning how to use it effectively.

The hype has gotten in the way of reality.

It's a tool explicitly designed to deprofrssionalize and commodify "knowledge work" - i.e. the thing people go to college to learn to do.

A good start would have been them not calling this artificial intelligence at all. The hype is largely based on the term "AI" and if it really is simply a (very impressive) auto complete tool it isn't intelligence at all, though as you said can be a very useful tool.

It's amazing that there are people who still believe in "it's just autocomplete". It hasn't been true for a long time, but currently it's position that reveals complete lack of awareness how good AI has become. It has solved Erdos problem using novel approach. Constant moving of goalpost is recurring theme when discussing AI, but it's really impossible to move it so far that you can frame this achievement as "impressive autocomplete".

I would draw a distinction here. If its a tool (as the GP proposed), it is just fancy auto complete. If it isn't a tool and is instead solving problems in novel ways, inventing new things, etc then it is intelligence and not a tool.

It can't be both in my opinion. To be a tool it needs to be controllable and predictable, intelligences are neither. See humans, and really all living things, for plenty of examples where they can't be completely controlled or predicted.

I mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?

> Because it's capable of impressive things?

Precisely. Calling it autocomplete when it's capable of completing tasks that have nothing to do with autocomplete is silly. If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete". What makes it double silly is that you can't really exclude that human intelligence is a stochastic process.

You're making an assumption that there is no difference between intelligence and auto complete with sufficient resources and learned patterns to complete tasks a human might do.

There may not be a difference there, I don't know but I wouldn't assume that intelligence is nothing more than sufficiently complex auto complete.

I'm not making that assumption. Specifically - I'm not making any assumption about nature of human intelligence, including not making assumption that it's not stochastic process. You exclude possibility that it is stochastic process without any good reason for it (wanting to call AI complex auto complete while keeping human intelligence completely safe from that label really is not good reason).

I said nothing of human intelligence either though, only intelligence.

I'm not excluding that what we consider intelligence isn't equivalent to autocomplete. Go back and read my last comment, I explicitly left the door open for those two being functionally the same. I was only pointing out that you seemed to be assuming intelligence is fancy auto complete rather than it could be fancy auto complete.

> If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete".

I'm fine with calling any process "autocomplete" if it takes language as input and returns predicted language as output.

I don't feel any need to broaden the definition to include things that have nothing to do with language.

I don't actually think its silly to call it auto complete.

Personally I could see it being either one. The LLM companies have drastically underfunded projects for things like interoperability. As long as inference is a black box we don't know whether its text prediction as a fancy tool or if something crazier has emerged that could be considered intelligent, self aware, conscious, etc. The former is easily assumed by the architecture, the latter seem far fetched but we simply can't know.

But that's their whole pitch: Altman is, last I heard, still insisting that they're going to have an AGI—in the sense of a "strong AI", capable of ushering in the supposed Singularity—by the end of the decade.

To be clear, I completely agree that we'd be better off as a society if they referred to all the LLMs as LLMs, and not as AI, but that's completely antithetical to their intentions and beliefs.

OpenAI's definition for AGI is entire bullshit though. They define it as an AI that can economically outcompete most humans at most tasks. They also claim to be concerned with safety.

Economics is a study of the past, we won't know what an AI can do economically until it is already released and allowed to directly compete with human labor. There's no safety in such an approach.

This is a bit ranty and not directed at you, to be clear. I just have no patience for how the LLM industry throws around terms at this point, especially OpenAI and Altman.

Indeed—and this is, itself, another part of the problem, because (again, last I heard) Altman himself was very clearly pitching the "AGI" they were going to create as something that was going to revolutionize the world practically overnight—create effectively infinite value. In other words, it would usher in the Singularity.

But an LLM that's able to "economically outcompete most humans at most tasks" (which, IMO, is likely still beyond their potential capability) is not that, and will never be that. They're just trying to have their cake and eat it too by moving the goalposts to 5 yards from the start point and claiming that they're still at the other end of the field. (Not to torturously mix my metaphors or anything.)

Because the first three sound completely awesome and the latter two are basically propaganda. "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet. These same people would probably riot if social media was made to disappear.

As everything regarding college campuses opinion nowadays, it's down to politics. It's not about AI, it's about how this comes in a time in which Silicon Valley is aligning itself with a right-wing government.

This explains why when China shows up with progress the news are actually well received, why opposition to data centers aligns itself with left-wing ethos (environmental, minorities) even if it, on its face, has a ridiculous impact on either, why there's more concern for job losses the closer the industry align with the left (Anyone curious about what financial advisors think of AI? No?), why the technology is seemingly at the same time absolutely useless and the end of white collar jobs, and thus a disaster either way, etc etc.

There are a lot of real valid concerns, it's an incredibly serious matter, if anything it needs more political attention, but the current discourse is a complete flood of utter idiocy and doesn't deserve respect, nor attention.

I think to most people, "you won't have to work any more" sounds like a good thing, except in our current society, it means "oh by the way, you and your children will starve".

Yeah I absolutely agree, if you ask me Andrew Yang should be getting calls about every day now, and UBI should be getting mentioned far more, but none of that is happening.

Opposing technology has a godawful track record and for some reason there's focus on that rather than tackling the actual problems. I bet that behind closed doors, directives are laughing at college students. Why, they are basically playing misdirection for them! It's fantastic for business.

The US can barely agree to fund food stamps for poor people with jobs. And we’ve got the richest man in the world screaming about welfare. The idea that UBI will save us as we aggregate more power and wealth to a few CEOs is a fantasy.

How will UBI be any more coherent than current tax laws?

As soon as UBI looks like it might happen, legislators will be drafting perverse incentives for themselves and their friends and family.

"you won't have to work any more at our company"

> "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet

I agree. And now I'm to trust the same people with even more money and control over global data dissemination? No thanks

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