[energy123]

The real criticism should be the AI doesn't say "I don't know.", or even better, "I can't answer this directly because my tokenizer... But here's a python snippet that calculates this ...", so exhibiting both self-awareness of limitations combined with what an intelligent person would do absent that information.

We do seem to be an architectural/methodological breakthrough away from this kind of self-awareness.

[spidersouris]

For the AI to say this or to produce the correct answer would be easily achievable with post-training. That's what was done for the strawberry problem. But it's just telling the model what to reply/what tools to use in that exact situation. There's nothing about "self-awareness".

[mike_d]

> But it's just telling the model what to reply/what tools to use in that exact situation.

So the exact same way we train human children to solve problems.

[spidersouris]

There is no inherent need for humans to be "trained". Children can solve problems on their own given a comprehensible context (e.g., puzzles). Knowledge does not necessarily come from direct training by other humans, but can also be obtained through contextual cues and general world knowledge.

[6510]

I keep thinking of that, imagine teaching humans was all the hype with hundreds of billions invested in improving the "models". I bet if trained properly humans could do all kinds of useful jobs.

[exasperaited]

> I keep thinking of that, imagine teaching humans was all the hype

This is an interesting point.

It has been, of course, and in recent memory.

There was a smaller tech bubble around educational toys/raspberry pi/micro-bit/educational curricula/teaching computing that have burst (there's a great short interview where Pimoroni's founder talks to Alex Glow about how the hype era is fully behind them, the investment has gone and now everyone just has to make money).

There was a small tech bubble around things like Khan Academy and MMOCs, and the money has gone away there, too.

I do think there's evidence, given the scale of the money and the excitement, that VCs prefer the AI craze because humans are messy and awkward.

But I also think -- and I hesitate to say this because I recognise my own very obvious and currently nearly disabling neurodiversity -- that a lot of people in the tech industry are genuinely more interested in the idea of tech that thinks than they are about systems that involve multitudes of real people whose motivations, intentions etc. are harder to divine.

That the only industry that doesn't really punish neurodivergence generally and autism specifically should also be the industry that focusses its attention on programmable, consistent thinking machines perhaps shouldn't surprise us; it at least rhymes in a way we should recognise.