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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

>BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS

humans rely on human inputs. can then talk about the small number of humans who push the boundaries of knowledge and then talk about when LLMs solve difficult math problems...

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There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to. No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity. But there is a fundamental difference between human creativity and the statistical processing of large amounts of data in an artificial neural network. The latter can yield new insights for the person operating the LLM. But if the insight was more or less contained 1-to-1 in the training data, this confirms the observation that the original contribution of LLMs consists mainly of unearthing relevant facts, but is otherwise very limited when it comes to synthetic judgments (in the Kantian sense).

If the claims made by LLM manufacturers regarding these systems' own capabilities repeatedly turn out to be little more than a hoax, critics of this practice shouldn't simply be dismissed as Luddites. Instead, we should acknowledge that, despite their remarkable capabilities, these systems ultimately deliver far, far, far less than what the snake-oil salesmen—cruising through the valley in their Koenigseggs—repeatedly promise to the public and investors. Anyone who still hasn't grasped this, even though it's so obvious, should urgently focus more on what is actually the case and less on what is being sold to us as the future. Anyone who thinks that technological leaps can simply be extrapolated linearly like this is just naive!

>There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to.

I am not an LLM advocate (nor am I an LLM skeptic), I simply observe and think about what I see. So, I guess your comment is not intended for me?

>No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity.

I read this as something a skeptic would write as apologium for himself: "I am stubborn and stick my heels in when presented with something new, first at productivity, but when forced to retreat, now taking a stand at creativity."

but again, you are defending/attacking a point that doesn't apply to me. I wrote originally to say "they learn from humans" was not a good argument against LLMs because humans learn from other humans. (a simple point which was why my comment was simple)

Very few humans are Aristotle, Newton, or Einstein, and those three were as well building on the work of others.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Issac Newton, in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke

I did not see a single bold claim of these discoveries or those "self-building models" that Claude and others have internally with a proof of their existence.

So yes, I am also skeptical. I think these companies are more intoncartelizing and colluding via propaganda than delivering stuff. They do deliver some, but very far from their promises.

These companies dangerously mimic behaviors I usually attribute to politicians.

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