> The OP is still in the "denial" phase.
This was written in July 2023. ChatGPT was released November 2022. No matter your views on AI, surely you can't blame the OP for writing this after a few months ChatGPT was released.
This was written in July 2023. ChatGPT was released November 2022. No matter your views on AI, surely you can't blame the OP for writing this after a few months ChatGPT was released.
Is the anti-AI camp with us in the room right now? Or is it a crude strawman to summarily denigrate any objections to certain features of current AI?
AI isn't some homogeneous mass, it can have good and bad sides, and it's always amendable to improvement. Treating the current state of AI as the only possible hides the very idea of improvement.
> between different and often mutually incompatible arguments at lightning speed.
Of course - there's no homogeneous AI camp either, but there are bot farms, sh^t-posters and sh^t-posting bot farms, different entities with different opinions should not be mistaken for a single stream changing at "lightning speed".
There are many mutually independent opinions about AI from IT crowd.
- AI is extremely useful for many individuals.
- AI is extremely damaging to our society as a whole.
- AI companies possibly may be (or at least were) deep in red and possibly would require bailing out.
- AI is not going anywhere.
- A person can use AI extensively AND genuinely hate it and forecast general economic slump because of it at the same time.
And likely many other ideas in the same vein. And by the way, I'm not here saying that I'm anywhere good about describing the issues about AI, those items above are just some examples to illustrate the scope of opinions.
My point is that you can't just take one single argument from a big group of people, deconstruct it (correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't matter) and then claim that ALL arguments of such big group of people are false. It's not a constructive dialog.
PS: also despite the accusations of goal-post shifting, a vast majority of opinions here on HN didn't actually change over the past few years.
That'd have been a hoot and a riot to watch. And I definitely would've grabbed my popcorn, haha.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...
Of course people were skeptical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/aslze7/gpt2...
I see a thought experiment about giving GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and [compute]” but that’s not falsifiable. That’s also not how we got to modern GPT models.
"If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling."
Anyway, there were plenty of normies who thought images generated by e.g. stable diffusion (c. 2022) was “real art” and equivalent to human artwork.
I don’t think it’s useful to glaze Scott (or any of the LW crowd for that matter) as if he was (or they were) some kind of prophet(s). They got a couple points right, sure, but most of it was them flinging armchair philosophy spaghetti against the wall and seeing who would fund MIRI to let them fling the next batch.
EDIT:
> Scott made comments on a specific emerging technology
He was speculating on what would happen if one gave GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and compute.” It’s a thought experiment, not a prediction. Near-infinite amounts of anything is a fantasy.
I acknowledge that he has predicted some things in a falsifiable way and turned out correct, but this isn’t one of them. You’re reading hindsight into the text.
2. The genre is alternatively called speculative fiction for a reason. Yes, some sci-fi works do count as predictions especially when hinged on concrete emerging technologies.
I read that blog years ago. Believe me, my opinions are not hindsight.
>Incorrect. He was speculating on what would happen if one gave GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and compute.” It’s a thought-experiment, not a prediction. Near-infinite amounts of anything is a fantasy.
Thought experiments can generate predicitons. His claim was essentially: If you scale data and compute sufficiently, this technology can learn enough of the underlying structure of mathematics to write proofs.
This is meaningful when others around you are saying this is a dead end and that the technology is fundamentally incapable of this regardless of degree of investment and scaling. It shows a much better calibrated sense of the potential of the architecture than those who said otherwise.
If your objection is that "near infinite" makes it insufficiently quantitative to count as a falsifiable forecast, then fine. But at that point we're mostly arguing over what deserves the label "prediction" rather than whether Scott correctly identified an important capability the architecture could develop.
And i'm not trying to say this makes Scott (or the lesswrong crowd) geniuses.
Bad takes are bad takes. The author was perplexed by the "many people" convinced that models are intelligent and is argued against opinions/arguments he's been exposed to. Called proposed use-cases "borderline fraudulent pseudoscience."
He also published a second edition of "The Intelligence Illusion" in Sep 2025, so seemingly still stands by (some variant of) this belief.
It's an interesting reminder of how much general discourse has shifted since 2023 (I haven't heard of stochastic parrots in months!) but being wrong early doesn't change that.