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Most of the time (with many notable exceptions), Hacker news comments are interesting and insightful, clearly written by intelligent and thinking people. However, in a number of AI threads, it seems like so many commenters are wearing the hype goggles when it comes to this technology. Large language models have their uses, but calling them AI, or thinking of them as AGI, seems like a mistake. I'm no expert, but insofar as I can tell, these things are just complex stochastic parrots; pattern matching algorithms at a massive scale. They really don't seem that useful outside of more narrow use cases, like language translation and other forms of data analytics. Just playing around with GPT/Bing chat for a while makes this obvious. The LLMs can't reason and have no actual awareness of the information they are regurgitating. A moments consideration of the output from these things shows them to be vapid and useless; a glorified parlor trick for the VC-funded tech industry to build hype around and make money. It's the next block chain/ crypto / NFT. There are great uses for block chain tech, same with machine learning / AI. But the scope of the claims made about these technologies in their hype cycles is just insane. Crypto is not going to replace fiat currency anytime soon. NFTs are stupid. LLMs are useless stochastic parrots. Maybe people are just wising up to that fact, now. Good on them. As a preemptive rebuttal:
I don't think LLMs are useful for coding either. If you want lots of sloppy, poorly written code, sure they're useful. But to write good software, you have to think carefully about what you're doing and have a thorough mental model of what's going on. Relying on AI to generate that code prevents that from happening from the outset. |
I agree that many commenters here are on the hype train, but you need to recognize that it’s possible to be on the anti-hype train as well.