[miyoji]

> But if you can not see it as amazing you have lost the capacity to dream.

I completely disagree. I think if you think these things are amazing, your dreams are incredibly limited and boring.

I remember the first time I talked to a chatbot. Not an LLM, just a regular chatbot, like ELIZA or any other dumb bot.

For a few seconds, it felt magical, like I was talking to a computer that understood me, as it made replies that were sensible to what I was saying. Then it said something incredibly stupid and jarring that made no sense, and that took the magic away. Oh, this is just a dumb computer program.

I remember the first time I talked to an LLM-powered chatbot. It was the exact same thing, except the magic feeling lasted a tiny little bit longer and was a tiny little more convincing. But it went away in the exact same way, for the exact same reason. Once you've seen the emperor without clothes, nothing brings back the magic.

[fnordpiglet]

That’s if you believe what’s magical is the computer is actually literally thinking and is a little human stuffed in a box. What’s magical is we’ve cracked NLP -and- abductive reasoning on a Turing machine. For those who have the capacity to dream the fact ELIZA wasn’t a person in a box didn’t break anything of the magic but inspired them with the fact that this mess of wires and cores could perform complex workflows of logic, not merely compute trigonometric functions. It could process text in protocols. It’s what inspired people to go forth and do things like email, phone, ytalk, irc, gopher, etc.

If your dreams begin and end with making a box with a person inside that’s the point I made. You can make a person in a box in 9 months, that’s not interesting or cool. What we can build with an LLM and genai in general is MUCH MUCH cooler than a metal baby. (And I think a conscious mind we control and manufacture but don’t recognize the rights of is a scarier horror movie than all the AI feat movies ever made put together, fwiw, so I’m glad your dreams were broken)

[DirkH]

I wonder if you think and feel the same level of boredom and complete lack of magic of the Apollo module once you learn how incredibly limited and not able to explore the whole solar system this tech was.