[stephencoyner]

As AI has continued to improve quickly, it’s been interesting to watch the sentiment of the tech community get more negative on it. “It’s not very good yet.” “No improvement since GPT-4.”

Objectively, today’s AI is incredibly impressive and valuable. We blew past the Turing test and yet no one seems to marvel at that.

I’d argue and we still have yet to discover the most effective ways to incorporate the existing models into products. We could stop progress now and have compelling product launches for the next few years that change industries. I’m confident customer support will be automated shortly - a previously large industry for human employment.

Is the negative sentiment fear from tech folks because they have a lot to lose? Am I just not understanding something? It feels like I can watch the progress unfold, but yet the community here continues to say nothing is happening.

[mixedbit]

> We blew past the Turing test and yet no one seems to marvel at that.

We didn't blow past the Turing test. Such comments are often made, but I think they are a result of misunderstanding or overgeneralizing of what a Turing test is. If you interact with a chatbot and it produces human-like answers, it doesn't mean it would pass or blow past the Turing test. Turing proposed a rigorous setup for the test, he designed it in such a way, that passing the test could really mean reaching human level intelligence. In the Turing test a human is asked to use all of their intelligence to reveal which of the two peers in a conversation is human and which is a machine. Current chatbots are very far from passing such a test.

[cloud8421]

From my perspective, the negativity stems from a general disregard of environmental impact, copyright or intellectual property, or education around hallucinations.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

yes this is indeed a huge problem. all these models are trained on massive amounts of stolen data and the creators aren't receiving any of the benefit. that seems a sheer disregard for private property rights, the one thing the govt should be in charge of.

[tomhoward]

I'll share a perspective as someone who doesn't really have a dog in the fight (For the record, I'm over 20 years into my career but don't fear losing roles/income/status due to AI, and am using it in my projects and can see plenty of ways I could benefit from it):

Lots of people on HN have been in tech for many years or a few decades and have seen several hype waves come and go, including ones involving AI. Plenty of us understand the technology that underlies current AI tech (even if we couldn't have built it ourselves). Some of us have spent plenty of time researching or contemplating nature of consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and see predictions/presumptions of human-like intelligence emerging from GPUs as at least a little silly. Plenty of us have come to know what it looks like when people are making grandiose claims – which they deeply believe to be true – particularly when great status and power seems within reach.

We can at-once happily recognise that contemporary LLMs are highly impressive and powerful, and the efforts of the researchers are brilliant and commendable, whilst also noting that these technologies have major pitfalls and limitations, and no obvious ways to resolve them.

The "blew past the Turing Test" claim is overblown, because we all know that an LLM-based product can seem human-like for much of the time, but then start generating crazy nonsense any moment. A human that behaves like that can cause millions of dollars in business losses, or planes to crash, and all kinds of other costs and harms. Human workers are evaluated on their ability to perform at a high-level on a consistent and predictable basis. By that measure, LLMs are nowhere near good enough for critical applications yet (even if they may be better than many humans at certain things, much of the time).

The claims that LLMs will just keep improving at an accelerating rate until they don't make mistakes anymore are fair enough to make, but until we see solid evidence that it's happening and details of the technology breakthroughs that will make it happen, people are within their rights to reserve judgement.