[keithnz]

I find the people who go "its just statistical" "its just picking the next word" have probably not really understood what the actual tool can do. Ultimately its arguable whether humans are just statistical also, our brains are pattern matching machines. It's just not sensible to boil it down complex behavior to a fundamental building block. It's not hype (though there is hype), vast amounts of people are getting real value out of it. I've been coding 40+ years, it's super obvious to me the utility of AI tools.

[DonaldPShimoda]

I don't think anywhere I said they weren't useful tools; I said that a lot of people fail to recognize the limitations, and that even aside from limitations/utility there is a discussion to be had about broader impact.

LLMs are not hype, but "AI" is. AI is a marketing term, and always has been.

[keithnz]

what makes you think that people are failing to recognize the limitations? Seems to me that's the most obvious thing when you try to build things with it.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Have you... talked to people? Like, people generally, not domain experts using these tools to augment their existing process.

Tons of people think AI is significantly more capable than it is. We've known for the better part of a century that generating text that merely pretends competence is enough to convince a significant portion of the population that it is competence.