[threethirtytwo]

Less than 6 months ago I would say about 50% of HN was at the denial phase saying it's just a next token predictor and that it doesn't actually understand code.

To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are. Remember I'm saying this to roughly 50% of HN., an internet community that's supposedly more rational and intelligent than other places on the internet. For this community to be so wrong about something so obvious.... That's saying something.

[qsera]

It doesn't actually understand anything...let alone code. And I think you are the one who is in denial.

[threethirtytwo]

If it doesn’t understand anything why the fuck are we letting it write all our code when it doesn’t understand code at all? Does that make any sense to you? Does that align with common sense? You’re still in denial.

You gonna give some predictable answer about next token prediction and probability or some useless exposition on transformers while completely avoiding the fact that we don’t understand the black box emergent properties that make a next token predicted have properties indistinguishable from intelligence?

[Toutouxc]

I'm letting it write (type out) most (80-98%) of my code, but I see it as an idiot savant. If the idea is simple, I get 100 lines of solid Ruby. Good, saves me time. If the idea is complicated (e.g. a 400-LOC class that distills a certain functionality currently scattered across different methods and objects) and I ask 4 agents to come up with different solutions, I get 4 slightly flawed approaches that don't match how I'd personally architect the feature. And "how I'd personally architect the feature" is literally my expertise. My job isn't typing Ruby, it's making good decisions.

My conclusion is that at this point, LLMs are not capable of making good decisions supported by deep reasoning. They're capable of mimicking that, yes, and it takes some skill to see through them.

[threethirtytwo]

Follow the trendline. It went from autocomplete to agentic coding. What do you think will happen to your “good decision making” in a couple years?

As of right now the one shot complex solutions AI comes up with are actually frequently extremely good now. It’s only gonna get better and this was in the last 6 months. You could be outdated on frontier model progress. That’s how quick things are changing.

[qsera]

This is not an appeal to authority, but this video probably contains the answers to your questions if you are open minded about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg

[threethirtytwo]

What questions do I have? I didn’t even mention a single question and you hallucinated an assumption that I have questions.

I don’t have any questions about LLMs. At least not any more than say an LLM researcher at anthropic working on model interpretability.

[qsera]

Can't you count? Are you an LLM?

[threethirtytwo]

No. I'm not an LLM, but you have intellectual issues. Counting? What does that have to do with anything?

[bigstrat2003]

> To all of you I can only say, you were utterly wrong and I hope you realize how unreliable your judgements all are.

They weren't wrong though. It objectively is just a next turn predictor and doesn't understand code. That is how the thing works.

[threethirtytwo]

Not true. You’re a next token predictor and clearly the tokens you predict indicate that the way you predict the next token is much much more then simply a probabilistic detection. You’re a black box and so is the LLM and the evidence is pointing at emergent properties we don’t completely understand but are completely inline with what we understand as reasoning.

Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are.

Use your brain. It is changing the industry from the ground up. It understands.

[qsera]

>Don’t make me cite George Hinton or other preeminent experts to show you how wrong you all are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvNCVYkHKfg

[threethirtytwo]

Yann Lecunn was vocal about his stance against LLMs very early on and claimed they were a dead end. Well he's been proven fucking wrong. Completely.

George Hinton was his mentor and George is the main god father of AI while Yann is more of a malfunctioning student still holding onto the stochastic parrot monicker. Here's George saying what you need to know:

https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1qwoee7/godfather_of_a...

[qsera]

> Well he's been proven fucking wrong. Completely.

How was he "proven" wrong?

> Yann is more of a malfunctioning student...

lol what?

[threethirtytwo]

He’s proven wrong by reality. Look at what LLMs are doing right now. It’s utterly obvious now that hallucinations are getting reduced, AI is extremely effective now…

Yann is malfunctioning because he cant reconcile his past statements with reality. He can’t admit he’s wrong. As time goes on his past statements will look even more and more absurd as progress on AI keeps moving forward.

At the same time we have Terence Tao using ai to develop new math and Hinton saying the opposite with actual evidence and the entire industry. Yann is a clown: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1piro45/people... and his opinions are not mainstream at all.

[charlie90]

Yes, I do find it a little funny how the developer community got it all wrong and the non technical people who were thinking AI is going to change everything in 2023 were the right ones. Maybe they know more than developers think.

[threethirtytwo]

They don't know more. Humanity mostly doesn't know how LLMs work because most of the properties just emerged from the soup of billions of weights whose sheer complexity is so high that understanding any of it holistically is impossible.

The difference is the arrogance. Developers think they know more. Developers think they're smart. And also there's an existential crisis where the LLM are poised to take over developer jobs first. So the developer calls every other layman an idiot and deludes himself into thinking his skills will always be superior to AI.