[Workaccount2]

Using my parents as a reference, they just thought it was neat when I showed them GPT-4 years ago. My jaw was on the floor for weeks, but most regular folks I showed had a pretty "oh thats kinda neat" response.

Technology is already so insane and advanced that most people just take it as magic inside boxes, so nothing is surprising anymore. It's all equally incomprehensible already.

[jacobedawson]

This mirrors my experience, the non-technical people in my life either shrugged and said 'oh yeah that's cool' or started pointing out gnarly edge cases where it didn't work perfectly. Meanwhile as a techie my mind was (and still is) spinning with the shock and joy of using natural human language to converse with a super-humanly adept machine.

[throw310822]

I don't think the divide is between technical and non-technical people. HN is full of people that are weirdly, obstinately dismissive of LLMs (stochastic parrots, glorified autocompletes, AI slop, etc.). Personal anecdote: my father (85yo, humanistic culture) was astounded by the perfectly spot-on analysis Claude provided of a poetic text he had written. He was doubly astounded when, showing Claude's analysis to a close friend, he reacted with complete indifference as if it were normal for computers to competently discuss poetry.

[khafra]

LLMs are an especially tough case, because the field of AI had to spend sixty years telling people that real AI was nothing like what you saw in the comics and movies; and now we have real AI that presents pretty much exactly like what you used to see in the comics and movies.

[xwolfi]

But it cannot think or mean anything, it's just a clever parrot so it's a bit weird. I guess uncanny is the word. I use it as google now, like just to search stuff that are hard to express with keywords.

[adventured]

99% of humans are mimics, they contribute essentially zero original thought across 75 years. Mimicry is more often an ideal optimization of nature (of which an LLM is part) rather than a flaw. Most of what you'll ever want an LLM to do is to be a highly effective parrot, not an original thinker. Origination as a process is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful (see: entrepreneurial failure rates).

How often do you need original thought from an LLM versus parrot thought? The extreme majority of all use cases globally will only ever need a parrot.

[robocat]

> clever parrot

Is it irony that you duckspeak this term? Are you a stochastically clever monkey to avoid using the standard cliche?

The thing I find most educating about AI is that it unfortunately mimics the standard of thinking of many humans...

[LEDThereBeLight]

Try asking it a question you know has never been asked before. Is it parroting?

[Agentlien]

My parents reacted in just the same way and the lackluster response really took me by surprise.