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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".
like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"
The y-axis is absolute eye bleach. Also implying that an "AI researcher" has the effective compute of 10^6 smart high schoolers. What the fuck are these chodes smoking?
They're just one step away from "Ouija board as a Service"
Ouija Board, Sexy Lady Voice Edition
Either sexy voice or the voice used in commercials for women and children. (I noticed a while back that they use the same tone of voice and that tone of voice now lowkey annoys me every time I hear it).
this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but don't currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it "speak", then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly "engaged" with the idea of a person'd pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isn't there
(combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but they're not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)
https://mander.xyz/post/13749821 that's probably this not sure if it ever happened
Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.
how exactly did he get googly eyes on a pencil. big "then an eagle flew around the classroom" energy
yeah, was that. not sure it happened either, but it's a good concise story for the point nonetheless :)
Same with when they added some features to the UI of gpt with the gpt40 chatbot thing. Don't get me wrong, the tech to do real time audioprocessing etc is impressive (but has nothing to do with LLMs, it was a different technique) but it certainly is very much smoke and mirrors.
I recall when they taught developers to be careful with small UI changes without backend changes as for non-insiders that feels like a massive change while the backend still needs a lot of work (so the client thinks you are 90% done while only 10% is done), but now half the tech people get tricked by the same problem.
i suppose there is something more "magical" about having the computer respond in realtime, and maybe it's that "magical" feeling that's getting so many people to just kinda shut off their brains when creators/fans start wildly speculating on what it can/will be able to do.
how that manages to override people's perceptions of their own experiences happening right in front of it still boggles my mind. they'll watch a person point out that it gets basic facts wrong or speaks incoherently, and assume the fault lies with the person for not having the true vision or what have you.
(and if i were to channel my inner 2010's reddit atheist for just a moment it feels distinctly like the ways people talk about Christian Rapture, where flaws and issues you're pointing out in the system get spun as personal flaws. you aren't observing basic facts about the system making errors, you are actively in ego-preserving denial about the "inevitability of ai")