Comment by exo-pla-net 2 days ago
This is a tech site, where >50% of us are programmers who have achieved greater productivity thanks to LLM advances.
And yet we're filled to the gills with Luddite sentiments and AI content fearmongering.
Imagine the hysteria and the skull-vibrating noise of the non-HN rabble when they come to understand where all of this is going. They're going to do their darndest to stop us from achieving post-economy.
I fail to see the difference. Actually, programming was one of the first field where LLMs shown proficiency. The helper nature of LLMs is true in all the fields so far, in the future this may change. I believe that for instance in the case or journalism the issue was already there: three euros per post written without clue by humans.
Anyway in the long run AI will kill tons of jobs. Regardless of blog posts like that. The true key is governments assistance.
I don't know what difference you are referring to. I was agreeing with you.
And also agreed: many trumpet the merits of "unassisted" human output. However, they're suffering from ancestor veneration: human writing has always been a vast mine of worthless rock (slop) with a few gems of high-IQ analysis hidden here and there.
For instance, upon the invention of the printing press, it was immediately and predominantly used for promulgating religious tracts.
And even when you got to Newton, who created for us some valuable gems, much of his output was nevertheless deranged and worthless. [1]
It follows that, whether we're a human or an LLM, if we achieve factual grounding and the capacity to reason, we achieve it despite the bulk of the information we ingest. Filtering out sludge is part of the required skillset for intellectual growth, and LLM slop qualitatively changes nothing.
[1] https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THE...
Sorry I didn't imply we didn't agree but that programmers were and are going to be impacted as much as writers for instance, yet I see an environment where AI is generally more accepted as a tool.
About your last point sometimes I think that in the future there will be models specifically distilling the climax of selected thinkers, so that not only their production will be preserved but maybe something more that is only implicitly contained in their output.
That's a good point: the greatest value that we can glean from one another is likely not epistemological "facts about the world", nor is it even the predictive models seen in science and higher brow social commentary, but in patterns of thinking. That alone is the infinite wellspring for achieving greater understanding, whether formalized with the scientific method or whether more loosely leveraged to succeed with a business endeavor.
Anecdotally, I met success in prompting GPT-3 to "mimic Stephen Pinker" when solving logical puzzles. Puzzles that it would initially fail, it would succeed attempting to mimic his language. GPT-3 seemed to have grokked the pattern of how Stephen Pinker thinks through problems, and it could leverage those patterns to improve its own reasoning. OpenAI o1 needs no such assistance, and I expect that o2 will fully supplant humans with its ability to reason.
It follows that all that we have to offer with our brightest minds will be exhausted, and we will be eclipsed in every conceivable way by our creation. It will mark the end of the Anthropocene; something that likely exceeds the headiest of Nick Bostom speculations will take its place.
It seems that this is coming in 2026 if not sooner, and Alignment is the only thing that ought occupy our minds: the question of whether we're creating something that will save us from ourselves, or whether all that we've built will culminate in something gross and final.
Looking around myself, however, I see impassioned "discourse" about immigration. The merits of DEI. Patriotism. Transgenderism. Religion. Copyright. Vast herds of dinosaurs preying upon one another, giving only idle attention to the glowing object in the sky. Is it an asteroid? Is it a UFO that is coming down to provide dinosaur healthcare? Nope, not even that level of thought is mustered. With 8 billion people on the planet, Utopia by Nick Bostrom hasn't even mustered 100 reviews on Amazon. On the advent of the defining moment of the universe itself, when virtually all that is imaginable is unlocked for us, our species' heads remains buried in the mud, gnawing at one another's filthy toes, and I'm alienated and disgusted.
The only glints of beauty I see in my fellow man are in those with minds which exceed a certain IQ threshold and cognitive flexibility, as well as in lesser minds which exhibit gentleness and humility. There is beauty there, and there is beauty in the staggering possibility of the universe itself. The rest is at best entomology, and I won't mourn its passing.
I think programmers are in the perfect profession to call LLMs out for just how bad they are. They are fancy auto-complete and I love them in my daily usage, but a big part of that is because I can tell when they are ridiculously wrong. Which is so often you really have to question how useful they would be for anything where they aren’t just fancy auto-complete.
Which isn’t AIs fault. I’m sure they can be great in cancer detection, unless they replace what we’re already doing because they are cheaper than doctors. In combination with an expert AI is great, but that’s not what’s happening is it?