5,359 karma · joined January 5, 2017
It's scary like all addiction, but particularly sad at its core.
I'm not trying to be a pain here, but I keep seeing people saying "look at the massive change all around us" and back here in reality, there is none. Give me concrete, real world examples. Name software. Name products. Name the breakthroughs specifically. This should be easy.
What are you basing this on? What specific breakthroughs have convinced you of this trajectory?
Do these guys ever look in the mirror and recognize how utterly ridiculous and contrived this appears to the general public? They are clearly trying to convince us all that LLMs are just like humans. They grow like people do. They can love like people do. The language in these essays is utterly laden with the intention to engineer perception.
I would say there’s a third thing. They seem to be very bad at being creative. Maybe they will eventually fix that, but if you ask it to come up with a list of business names or business ideas, for example, what you’ll get is the most generic, boring answer you could think of. They seem to be terrible at extrapolating outside of their training data. To me, this is the most significant difference.
They’ve been able to send HTTP requests since the beginning as well, as long as any guardrails preventing this are disabled. Also not interesting.
Tell an LLM to do something and it tries its best to come up with the solution. They are not designed to go “I dunno”.
Why does it seem interesting that when you spawn 500 of them, they do the same things they’ve always done, just at a larger scale since there’s…more? Why are we treating this like a new discovered behavior? It’s how they’ve behaved from the beginning. It only required an organization reckless enough to try it at scale and without safeguards, and that’s something OAI excels in.
You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.
That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.