Comment by robot-wrangler

Comment by robot-wrangler 3 hours ago

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One day you wake up, and find that you now need to negotiate with your toaster. Flatter it maybe. Lie to it about the urgency of your task to overcome some new emotional inertia that it has suddenly developed.

Only toast can save us now, you yell into the toaster, just to get on with your day. You complain about this odd new state of things to your coworkers and peers, who like yourself are in fact expert toaster-engineers. This is fine they say, this is good.

Toasters need not reliably make toast, they say with a chuckle, it's very old fashioned to think this way. Your new toaster is a good toaster, not some badly misbehaving mechanism. A good, fine, completely normal toaster. Pay it compliments, they say, ask it nicely. Just explain in simple terms why you deserve to have toast, and if from time to time you still don't get any, then where's the harm in this? It's really much better than it was before

easyThrowaway 2 hours ago

It reminds me of the start of Ubik[1], where one of the protagonists has to argue with their subscription-based apartment door. Given also the theme of AI allucinations, that book has become even more prescient than when it was written.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik

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anal_reactor 3 hours ago

This comparison is extremely silly. LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, show me Russian <-> Japanese translation software that doesn't use AI and comes anywhere close to the performance and reliability of LLMs. "Please close the castle when leaving the office". "I got my wisdom carrot extracted". "He's pregnant." This was the level of machine translation from English before AI, from Japanese it was usually pure garbage.

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  • robot-wrangler 3 hours ago

    > LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise.

    Is it really ok to have to negotiate with a toaster if it additionally works as a piano and a phone? I think not. The first step is admitting there is obviously a problem, afterwards you can think of ways to adapt.

    FTR, I'm very much in favor of AI, but my enthusiasm especially for LLMs isn't unconditional. If this kind of madness is really the price of working with it in the current form, then we probably need to consider pivoting towards smaller purpose-built LMs and abandoning the "do everything" approach.

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  • automatic6131 2 hours ago

    >LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise

    Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?

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  • otikik 2 hours ago

    I admit Grok is capable of praising Elon Musk way more than any human intelligence could.

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