daishi55

Every time I read one of these types of posts, I never have any idea what the author is talking about.

> at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you with all the powers your user has.

This is not at all how it works on macOS, which is what is being discussed in the original post. There are a million different things that require per-app explicit opt-in permissions. This is a case of user error.

It’s not possible. User error lol

LOL! Very sad.

And of course there is a lot of ambiguity and unknown here. But this guy I don’t think has the capacity to deal with that kind of subtlety.

Yeah you already tried that one.

You’re hiding behind implications because your actual argument doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.

You have yet to respond to either of the points I made. Zero intellectual conviction or courage!

Can you give an example of some of these things?

Oh no I meant to compare myself to the person I am talking to, because I believe my credentials and pedigree ought to convince them that I am a pretty smart guy and so the argument “if you think LLMs are intelligent then you’re dumb” doesn’t ring true for me.

Sorry but are you trying to subtly imply that if I think LLMs are intelligent, I’m probably actually just a bit stupid?

Because I would be more than happy to go head to head with you on academic and professional pedigree and credentials.

I notice you also ignore my comment that you seem to be replying to and instead post your response here. But did you have any answer to the question I asked?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776482

I’m sorry but you either haven’t been following recent developments or you are pretending not to know the opinions of the top mathematicians on this topic:

> These models are now operating[2] at the level of the top human mathematicians in many parts of the subject and we must assume there is a significant chance of them developing superhuman abilities within a similarly short timeframe.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-xOkPeHmDEdRigT2YcP2...

Instead of desperately clinging to excuses and rationalizations, why don’t you just get used to the fact that these tools are insanely useful for demanding intellectual work, and that is an opinion held by many of the smartest people alive?

The point for me is that all these people who were smirking at those of us who thought in 2023 that LLMs had the potential to do real intellectual work turned out to be completely wrong.

I’m a super skeptical guy. I was late to the ChatGPT party because it sounded silly. I didn’t even try it for a long time. As soon as I started giving it a chance, my attitudes started changing very quickly.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to understand people like the author or give them the benefit of the doubt. If I could see it as just some guy, why couldn’t they?

You seem to be winking a little bit and I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to say, but I agree with the one you are replying to: the author of this article wrote a lot of words - like a lot a lot of words - only to look very foolish a short time later. And I think much ink was similarly spilled writing very similar piece smirking at people who thought LLMs could do real intellectual work. And they were all wrong.

From the open letter signed by Terry Tao and other top mathematicians:

> These models are now operating at the level of the top human mathematicians in many parts of the subject and we must assume there is a significant chance of them developing superhuman abilities within a similarly short timeframe.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1N6ThWhupvmH0ofSnaxqn...

I think LLMs are intelligent. What don’t I understand about them that would make me change my mind? Keeping in mind that for me “intelligence” is the ability to solve complicated, intellectually demanding problems, and to understand novel concepts.

> The LLM did not solve it. It's not intelligent. Humans did,

The humans who are using LLMs to make these groundbreaking advances pretty much unanimously disagree that they lack any intelligence.

That is very much not the consensus of experts.

> many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent. But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this

Seems like we can just stop reading here right? The author seems to have made up their mind that this very open question is closed, or at least they are not really interested in the question at all. Not sure why I would continue reading a blog based on this premise.

Edit: oh I see, written in 2023. Well, I wonder if the author has updated their attitude towards this question? Indeed that would be the most interesting thing to know.

How about jobs without KPIs? Jobs without performance reviews? Can we get a list of jobs where I don’t have to do any work?

Jobs are full of things we don’t like or don’t want to do. I don’t understand this fixation on leetcode as unacceptable because some people feel it’s not related to the work? So is being likeable!

> And yet, despite having found literally thousands of new vulnerabilities (only a fraction of which were reported to Open Source projects, by the way), I don't think that we're any safer than before.

I’m not sure I follow. There are dozens of zero day, full RCE/privilege escalation linux vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed due to the use of LLMs. Some of which existed for decades. Unclear how that doesn’t make us safer than before.

Hmmm. I don’t really have any issues with frontier models not implementing my prompts correctly, and presumably that will only become more and more the case as the models get better and better. This seems like almost a non-issue already and certainly on its way to becoming one for sure?

Yeah you’re right. And also part of it is that I simply don’t know enough deep physics to maybe start to get a more “intuitive” grasp on things.

But on the other hand I do feel there are cases where other fields have true explanations without punting. It’s not all the time but sometimes. My favorite example is evolution. We observe evidence that species evolve over long periods. Why? Natural selection. It’s the entire explanation. And I suppose in some senses it punts on the mechanisms of natural selection - genes and molecular biology rest on physics and chemistry after all. But in terms of the why, why does evolution happen, I feel we have a complete answer that has that feeling of intellectual satisfaction and completeness that is, at least from my lay perspective, lacking in physics.

The kernel is programmed, and it only ever does exactly what it was programmed to do. So all of its behavior must be specified, and any problem it “solves” was solved by the programmer who told it exactly how to solve that problem. That is not autonomous.

Autonomous is when I tell codex “here is the chat where the user reported the issue. Solve the problem they reported” and I come back later and the problem is solved.

Yes which is exactly my point? It can handle the ambiguity of a simple prompt. It can look into the problem I’ve pointed it at, figure out what is really go on, and implement a correct solution, autonomously.

Whew, really fantastic article!

> “In physics, description is explanation” (author quoting his PhD advisor)

Yes, i have always hated this about physics. It is the only scientific field that apparently feels no responsibility to explain “why”, deciding that “what” is sufficient.

I wish the author all success so that i can someday read a satisfying answer to some of the “whys” of physics.

I mean in that sense nothing is autonomous right? As a human I need to be taught, fed, socialized, given instructions, etc…

Idk man when codex is working 13 hours straight based on a few line prompt, it feels autonomous to me.

> Sure, there is an autocomplete aspect, but it's not the core nor anywhere near the full story.

This can apply equally to LLMs or humans. So what is the utility of the word if it just describes the whole range of things we are talking about?

Models should be accurate. I was saying the mental model should be readjusted in that case because it does not reflect reality.

If they don’t care about understanding reality then sure, they can use whatever mental model they want.

I’m not policing anything. I’m claiming that if you truly in your heart believe that frontier LLMs are roughly as sophisticated and impressive as “autocomplete”, then your mental model of reality needs some serious readjustment.

> Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

This is the writing of someone who has absolutely zero interest in or intellectual curiosity about the subject of their writing.

That is all that Ed Zitron deserves lol. Completely unserious person. Really on the same intellectual level as the flat earthers at this point. And at both we may simply point and laugh.

I don’t think the person you replied to was saying anything about what if anything is the subjective experience of being an LLM.

They were simply illustrating how the terms used to describe LLMs to make them sound simple and mechanical can equally be applied to humans.