How is what people do any better or different than the Really Good Guessing Machine?

I really don’t understand this perspective, and it’s my biggest gripe with Chollet and his ilk as well. What, in your opinion, makes neuro-symbolic AI inherently superior to (the currently better performing) statistical methods?

I don’t think it’s really possible to do this.

I mean speaking just logistically, how would you determine who gets how much? If it’s based on quality, how do you determine what is of high quality? Otherwise, does everyone who has every written anything that finds its way into a training dataset get like a tenth of a cent?

Alternative proposal: all AI models must be released as open weights, available to everyone.

AI, through its use of training data, has benefited from the sum total of human knowledge, therefore the results of this training should be given back for the use of all humanity.

That seems fair to me.

Pretty sure that was “lost” as in, “needing a map.” Not everything needs to be about winning or losing.

You got a reference for that?

Yeah, that is a pretty shitty consequence, but it’s nothing new or different from the strandard clean room techniques the industry has been using for decades.

Does the cost outweigh the benefits?

No.

I fail to see how this has anything to do with the Harry Potter lady or the YouTube tech guy.

I think you are making a category error.

For your argument to be coherent, it must be the case that low-skilled individuals would otherwise go on to become domain experts if not for their use of large langue models. While the reality is that these individuals would likely never rise to the level of expertise in any case.

You and your interlocutor were essentially talking past one another. LLMs have a disproportionately negative effect on low-skilled, low-intelligence, or uncritical individuals. LLMs improve personal and professional development while being extremely useful to highly-skilled, high-intelligence, or critically thinking individuals. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.

The point that’s being danced around is that LLMs multiply the divide between those who blindly consume and those who think criticality for themselves, and this is a problem. The larger question of whether it shifts more of the later group into the former, is yet to be studied.

Yeah, I think you’ve nailed it.

There’s no stopping the Holocene extinction. Our only hope as a species is to try to survive it and to position ourselves so that we end up in the best-possible position on the other side. I see continued, rapid technological progress (including AI development) as the most realistic means to accomplishing these ends.

I don’t think Ishmael was wrong, I just think the viewpoint isn’t realistically actionable.

I think I’m (unfortunately) starting to really understand what Frank Herbert meant when he wrote, “Fear is the mind killer.” It’s very disheartening to see legitimate concerns snowball into lemming-like behavior.

When in the throws of despair or grieving for a society in decline I’d typically appeal to the classic MiB quote:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

But as the years go by it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find solace there — mostly because my experience is showing me that it’s simply no longer true. I feel like I’m living in a world where everyone read Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and most people responded with, “Where do I sign?”

I’ve observed this behavior from both doomers and AI evangelists.

However, in the effort of full-disclosure, I must admit that I am a staunch accelerationist. That’s because, when viewed from a cosmological perspective, the only rational way to describe the last few hundred years of human development would be as an explosion, and I firmly believe the only path out is forward. Standing against the tide of technological progress at this point would be akin to standing against a blast wave.

That’s really damn scary.

The real sticking point seems to be that increased knowledge does not alleviate the existential dread. On the contrary, in many ways it exacerbates the mortal fear. Knowledge without power or prescience is impotent. Not that it would make a difference anyway.

If we had developed the concept of The Great Filter before the steam engine, would the world have responded to Watt’s machine in the same way it’s responding to Dario’s now? And would that have even made a lick of difference?

Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.

Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.

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That was written when less than 10% of the population was literate because of how expensive and difficult it was to learn. There was no publicly funded literary education, and public opinion on literacy was at best contentious.

It’s not a similar conclusion. You are literally parroting the same talking points. They are just as fundamentally misguided and divorced from reality now as they were 2000 years ago.

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You have, and let me be clear on this, absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

…said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)

Why don’t you try getting a new argument, yours is a bit dated.

(Although part of me feels like reverse-engineering binary blobs might in fact be a valid use case for LLM’s)

Except the resulting packages would no longer be allowed in AlpineBSD.

What! You mean the bioaccumulating micro particles are not totally harmless? I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you.

What’s next? Are you gonna tell me water is wet, or fire is hot?

Don’t get me wrong, having the empirical validation (along with a mechanism) is nice, but this should cone as a shock to absolutely nobody.