| >To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers.Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. That's an uncharitable take of what he actually said, he was clearly talking about being able to get information presented as if it was explained by a particular person. The training data contains everything that person ever wrote, so it might be pretty close. Fake sure, but also often correct and presented in a familiar way. I've often thought that many concepts I struggled with in school came down to the teacher explaining them in ways that was "incompatible" (for lack of a better word) with my way of thinking for that particular concept. Not that I was special, I think every student experiences this from time to time. Being able to continue asking questions about dinosaurs or atoms or the roman empire long after any human teacher would get tired will help many a curious kid learn faster than they could before. >I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves I find this take strange - you still have to think but LLM's help you. Googling things or tracking down a breaking change in version 9.2 from 8.7 or why a regexp is not working correctly is not thinking. It's just busywork. Spreadsheets removed the satisfaction of "carrying the one" with pen and paper and a whole bunch of valued skills lost value - but it turned out fine. Same with going from assembly to C or C to Java. We ended up with more programmers and more software, not less. I think once the dust settles LLM's will be a similar change, if perhaps much larger in scope. |