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by threethirtytwo 55 days ago
This is the most pedantic argument ever.

"All men are created equal" is obviously not literally saying all humans are 100% equal. Just like how "ChatGPT equalizes intelligence" is not saying ChatGPT equalizes the intelligence of all humans to a level of 100%.

I'm not going to spell out what I meant by: "ChatGPT equalizes intelligence". You can likely figure it out for yourself, because the problem doesn't have anything to do with your reading comprehension. The problem is more akin to self delusion, you don't want to face reality so you interpret the statement from the most absurdist angle possible.

The admins at HN actually noticed this tendency among people and encoded it into the rules: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

1 comments

It is not “absurdist” to call out a baseless claim that doesn’t take into account over half of humanity, a percentage that will grow even further once investor money inevitably runs out. If your response to that is to wave away more than 4 billion people, then you’re not even trying to look like you care about reality, you’re just trying to make yourself feel better with some made-up nonsense.

You seem to be under the misconception that you somehow “own” ChatGPT or are entitled to the insight it provides. You don’t and you aren’t. You are at the mercy of trillion-dollar private companies that owe you nothing. Their products’ intelligence is not your intelligence. Whatever profits you’re seeing from it, it’s currently losing them money. And when that changes, so will your image of them as benefactors of humanity who make intelligence available to all.

It is fucking absurdist and pedantic when I hear this drivel coming out of the mouth of a hypocrite. You’re already part of the privileged few. Every single thing that you do from drinking clean water to writing your bullshit on the Internet is the result of your own arguments of distributing technology among the top percentage. And as a recipient of such benefits you should have the intelligence to see that even that much matters. Why don’t you raise your shit against the ass holes who are really making things unequal: Internet service providers and their astronomical fees which don’t equalize the world enough such that homeless people have access to the internet. That’s societies real problem according to your genius logic… so stop your tirade against AI as their are bigger fish to fry.

> You seem to be under the misconception that you somehow “own” ChatGPT or are entitled to the insight it provides.

Right now for the price of a new car I can definitely get enough hardware to run a local LLM to the quality of ChatGPT at my home. And this is just the status quo. The demand for this technology and the projection of improvement in prices predicts a future where you can run one for the price of a new computer. Wake up.

But who the fuck cares? Point being is AI is equalizing intelligence and you’re just throwing in tangents and side branches to try to disentangle the obvious general truth which I will repeat: AI is fucking equalizing intelligence and if you don’t agree, you’re absurd.

You open with an insult directed at the HN community. Then you call me names. Then you lecture me about HN guidelines. Then you post this.

Flagging because this kind of language has no place on HN.

Oh if your so but hurt by this go ahead and call me names if you want. Hypocrite is not really that much of an insult and it's true. You called someone absurd as well.

> Then you lecture me about HN guidelines.

Not a lecture. An example of how it's a well known issue. I'm obviously not a rule follower myself; and your content is not really fit for HN either. Once you flag the entire conversation is over. I don't really care, but if I were you I'd rather end the argument by being right instead of running away and tattle tailing to the authorities. Up to you.

maybe the admins come in and block the convo, delete it, and/or ban me. Who knows. I don't care. The fact of the matter is... I'm right, and you know it. Everything I said here is true, and you're turning to this way to end it because you can't face it.

<meta> You're incredibly rude but at the same time.... 100% right. On first reading it was quite off-putting, but your conclusions are solid. Emotions take over rationality, and people - just like thinking models - reverse-engineer a logical-sounding explanation for their actions, they don't "expose" their internal chain of thought.

Maybe the models are closer to us than we're comfortable to admit.

> It is not “absurdist” to call out a baseless claim that doesn’t take into account over half of humanity, a percentage that will grow even further once investor money inevitably runs out.

I love the confidence that comes from this claim. You can run open models in your laptop today compare to the best models from 2 years ago. But sure spread your FUd about investor money running out

I have nothing against open weight models, my issue is more with these mega-corporations posing as saviors of humanity. That said, how is your consumer hardware going to out-compete a datacenter when it has more mouths to feed per token than a datacenter? Who is going to give you money to run anything when a machine can do everything you can do?

No matter how you spin it, we humans are now becoming thermodynamically less efficient versions of LLMs. We contribute nothing of value to the system, so economics dictates we have no place in it except as investors. Skill is nothing now, and ownership is everything. So yeah, I'm afraid of the future. Call it FUD or whatever, I don't care.