Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by danielbln 1032 days ago
Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.
3 comments

> private, local and in the hand of the people.

We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity.

If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options.

Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience).

[1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency

But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.
I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.
Who is we? The model creator or the user? Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?
>Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?

Yes, you put in a person + knowledge and get out an educated person. Is it reasonable to expect to put in GPU + text and get somehow a competent actor, however narrowly we define competence (maybe if we define actor narrowly enough)?