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by fhd2 491 days ago
It's a matter of perspective and expectations.

The automobile was a useful invention. I don't know if back then there was a lot of hype around how it can do anything a horse can do, but better. People might have complained about how it can't come to you when called, can't traverse stairs, or whatever.

It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface. Doing just one thing better is evidently valuable.

I think AI is valuable from that perspective, you provide a good example there. I might well be disappointed if I would expect it to be better than humans at anything humans can do. It doesn't have to. But with wording like "co-scientist", I see where that comes from.
2 comments
ClumsyPilot 491 days ago
> It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface

I would say the doubters were right, and the results are terrible.

We redesigned the world to suit the car, instead of fixing its shortcomings.

Navigating a car centric neighbourhood on foot is anywhere between depressing and dangerous.

I hope the same does not happen with AI. But I expect it will. Maybe in your daily life AI will create legal contracts there are thousands of pages long And you will need AI of your own to summarise them and process them.

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fhd2 490 days ago
Excellent point. Just because the invention of the automobile arguably introduced something valuable, how we ended up using them had a ton of negative side effects. I don't know enough about cars or horses to argue pros and cons. But I can certainly see how we _could_ have used them in a way that's just objectively better than what we could do without them. But you're right, I can't argue we did.
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ANewFormation 490 days ago
It's not just about doing something better but about the balance between the pros and the cons. The problem with LLMs are hallucinations. If cars just somehow made you drive the wrong way with the frequency that LLMs send one down the wrong path with compelling sounding nonsense, then I suspect we'd still be riding horses nowadays.
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fhd2 490 days ago
I can get value out of them just fine. But I don't use LLMs to find answers, mostly to find questions. It's not really what they're being sold/hyped for, of course. But that's kinda my point.
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