[sealeck]

These are all people running AI labs! They want investment, and what better way to get investment than to tell people you're going to create Terminator? The people leaving OpenAI are joining other labs – their livelihoods depend on AI companies receiving investment: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

> The models keep getting better at an exponential [sic].

We don't know if this is true. A lot of growth that appears exponential is often quadratic (https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/) or follows a logistic function (e.g. Moore's law).

Additionally there's a LOT of benchmark gaming going on, and a lot of the benchmark solving is not down to having a process that actually solves the problems; it just turns out that the problems already kind of lie in the span of text on the internet.

[raghavtoshniwal]

I feel insane cognitive dissonance when I read a comment like this. I know/hope what you're saying is in good faith and you aren't trolling. Yet my own experience on how good these models have become and how rapidly they're improving makes me feel like we're talking about 2 completely different things.

Screw the benchmarks, it feels insane how much utility these models already provide in my life and that they keep getting better. I guess all my problems are simple and and "lie in the span of text on the internet", but they're still extremely valuable to me.

[sealeck]

People are capable of having really deep conversations with ELIZA (program which just asked questions about things you said). I think there's a kind of "ooh it's language it must be clever" which I think is mistaking the symptom for the effect.

I'm not denying that the large language models may have some (marginal) utility, I'm saying that they're not going to magically turn into Skynet, no matter how much people dream.

I suspect they are not going to have as many applications as people claim: we are a few years in now and we see that the applications are trailing WAY behind the huge level of investment into building datacenter infrastructure. There's some good stuff in FT AlphaVille about this.

[aerhardt]

I like AI, and I use it every day. I'm not a software dev, but I do write software professionally, and I also use AI for designing and architecting solutions. I feel the technology is eminently useful, and it's made me maybe 20-30% more productive, which is massive. I can reconcile all this without believing a lot of the hype and outlandish claims, and without feeling it's a cognitive disonance.