[kubb]

It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence.

I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1).

Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to mastering, they assume that the system will be able to handle any task that they delegate, including programming, system design, project management, etc. Since the people doing this are paid less than them, surely it must be simply easier.

By this intuition, LLMs have now become intelligent, and are capable of handling anything at all. It is a must we find a way to integrate them in all of our products. And so, they’re now AI.

(1) That speech doesn’t necessarily have to carry a lot of meaning. Its main purpose is establishing the competence of the speaker.

[PaulHoule]

5 years ago we felt like we had to write programs that always get the right answer. We never realized that all it had to do was apologize and people wouldn’t mind.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about it because it can bullshit better than he can and never has to take a break. It can replace the authors of The New York Times opinion page if not the actual reporters. Can it replace the CEO?

[temporarely]

Why not the presidency. Every four years there is a battle to fine tune the executive LLM, but a secret deep state controls the actual code running and so the LLM is modified to fake partisan fights.

p.s. only slightly tongue in cheek. Use of AI by state to manage social perception is on my bingo card. It will be very effective.

[tim333]

I've thought a bit about the practicality of using an LLM for a president type job. I think it could work ok with some manual override. You'd need documents with the plans and principles to follow but they'd be open source so the people could see what was going on, and if it said something silly the human leader could override but it would be public so the voters could see the LLM said do this but the humans said no that so you could keep tabs. It would make the process more open than the present system where politicians lie to get elected and then do other stuff behind closed doors.

[cm277]

After being initially dazzled, I've drifted firmly into the camp of "this hype cycle is nonsense". I get why VCs/Startups/investors/legislators want (or even need) a hype cycle in a post-ZIRP economy, in an election year, with geo instability. But there's nothing, neither data/evidence that LLM === AGI or even a path that points towards LLM → AGI.

AFAICT, LLMs are stochastic predictors of words within a large context. If you transfer (pun intended) that behavior over to humans, you would call a person like that a bullshitter, or at best a salesguy :-) A bullshitter as a person or team member is useful, but not scalable in the singularity sense: you can scale its output in terms of quantity, but not quality: the stochastic parrot may move prospects through the funnel (necessarily to a higher-IQ actual salesperson) but it will not create a patent from scratch (and probably will not close a deal).

So, we're not getting AGI. Given that the stochastic approach has hit scalability limits (there's no more data to feed), we need a new approach. Are there approaches that can bring AGI outside of LLMs? (AlphaZero?) Or is our industry just a bunch of stochastic parrots that complete every sentence with "eventually we'll have AGI and everything will be either great or destroyed" (which is exactly what an LLM would say at this point)?

[tim333]

From the article

>...The smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology.

That's how you go beyond current LLMs. They'll figure something.

[PurpleRamen]

Reads like execs just have a new delusion about outsourcing the work of high paid workers to someone cheaper. Curious how this bubble will bust, or if they can fake it long enough to reach the singular point where the delusion becomes real.

[boyka]

SV?

[NiloCK]

Silicon Valley