|
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. |