Comment by woah 5 hours ago
Warning- it's a Gary Marcus article. This is a guy who started out dissing LLMs to pump his own symbolic AI startup, was (likely to his surprise) hoisted on the shoulders of a mass of luddites, and has now pivoted to a career as an anti-AI influencer
https://garymarcus.substack.com/archive?sort=new
Yeah, this guy is... something. The text form equivalent to Youtube Shorts.
He didn't "start out" when LLMs were growing or at the time he founded a symbolic AI startup.
He "started out" a lot earlier, he wrote a book in 2001 and his written 8 books in total and has publications in academic journals like Cognitive Psychology dating back to 1995.
The world didn't start when LLMs got popular.
Meh, he’s been very fairly calling out AI companies for over-promising and under-delivering, along with critiquing the idea that training LLMs on bigger data will solve AGI.
He’s vocal and perhaps sometimes annoying, but who cares. A number of his articles have made great points at times when people are loosing themselves with hype for AI. Reality is somewhere in the middle, and it’s good to have more people critiquing what AI companies are doing. Who cares if a lot of the blog posts are short and not that interesting.
> Meh, he’s been very fairly calling out AI companies for over-promising and under-delivering, along with critiquing the idea that training LLMs on bigger data will solve AGI.
But we don't want that! We want blind faith in the promises of SV AI companies. We want positivity!
Because the overall "discourse" on this has devolved into tribal politics that have very little to do with the technology anymore.
I think that the tribalism is one sided.
On one side you have people who know how to build deep nn saying one thing, and on the other there seems to be people who don’t even know what tanh is and are very sure of their “strong” opinions.
Do you have an example of someone who actually knows how LLMs work who has a tribalistic view?
“people who don’t even know what tanh is” sounds like something a tribe-member criticizing outsiders would say :)
Lol, I like that as a joke, but I wouldn’t think you are saying “a person who has no idea how something works” their opinion should be given equal weighting as someone who actually knows? Maybe you are - that seems to be how things work now.
I think you already get what I am saying, but it seems that there are maybe 3 groups. 2 who know how things work under the hood and have differing opinions and are curious to hear the other side, and one group who have no idea how things work, are very loud, have sci-fi fantasies, and spout strong opinions.
I wouldn't call that discourse i would call it ignorance.
It's weird though, the critics of LLMs have very good points, usually very reasonable but when they share them they get downvoted and criticized like someone who was critical of NFTs in 2022.
I wonder why that is, and what it portends regarding the future of that "tribe"
Great, can't wait to balance the ultra-pro-AI views I get everyday from mainstream media, X, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.