[duendefm]

Well despite my current anti AI sentiment, I have to admit that after reading the article, It was a good use of AI, done by someone with good technical skills. Still I have the feeling that this only works because of the vast accumulated knowledge pre-AI, and if everybody keeps going in this path, it will end up making everyone not advancing their knowledge at the pace they did before. I feel that this AI immersion is really about selling our soul to the devil for short term gains.

[bitlad]

I think AI is powertool. Period. If you give it to people who are skill, it will create a mess.

I think democratization of intelligence is going to be interesting. You could say the same with same about internet. I think it is part of evolution. May be intelligence or expertise is what does not make us special. May be it is that we are ingenious amd creative with tools and thats how we evolve.

[choilive]

There are some studies that suggest human brain sizes have been shrinking over the last 20,000 years. The theory is that as civilization developed the demand for individual humans to be independently intelligent has weakened because we developed a "collective brain" and also self-domesticated to be more cooperative.

[veidelis]

Honestly there might be truth to it, I don't get the downvotes - why?

[Someone]

The correlation between brain volume and intelligence is fairly weak. Neanderthals had larger brains than humans, for example. Looking outside the hominids, we have fairly smart corvids with relatively tiny brains.

That means the chain of thought “brains volume decreased, so individuals must have gotten less intelligent. Yet, societies grew smarter, so there must be herd intelligence” breaks at “so individuals must have gotten less intelligent”.

I think/guess that argument may have merit when replacing brain volume by number of neurons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...)

[steve_adams_86]

> democratization of intelligence

I'm not trying to be pedantic; I think this is an interesting topic and there's a worthwhile distinction to make here. It isn't really being democratized for a couple reasons (at least).

One, access to information isn't truly knowledge in and of itself. People allowing information from LLMs to pass through their brains are not necessarily retaining any of it, and their ability to synthesize and utilize disparate information from LLMs isn't inherently improved by this technology. So the premise of knowledge isn't very sturdy in my mind.

Two, LLMs function across very broad fields of capability, accuracy, content, and so on, and the best models are not accessible to many people. I find people tend to mean the technology is widely available and accessible when they say 'democratization', but that's not necessarily true nor what that word means to begin with.

True democratization would mean something more like "everyone participates in, shapes, regulates, and grows this technology with their own inputs". I don't think that's what happens at all, and in fact, it has been quite the inversion of that so far.

I mention all of this because I agree that it will be interesting to watch what happens, but I don't agree that it will be for the same reasons. I worry about it specifically because there is not an egalitarian distribution of knowledge, and it is not democratically built or shared.

[ekidd]

> May be it is that we are ingenious amd creative with tools and thats how we evolve.

And every time you use the AI to be ingenious or creative, that will be added to the training data. Then someday the AI can be ingenious and creative without you! (It might take a few more breakthroughs. But investors will literally spend trillions chasing those breakthroughs.)

The endgame here is to replace all human intelligence and labor with machines that are smarter and work cheaper. But who controls the machines?

[bitlad]

> And every time you use the AI to be ingenious or creative, that will be added to the training data That's part of evolution.

We as humans have always outsmarted the tools.

[Daishiman]

> till I have the feeling that this only works because of the vast accumulated knowledge pre-AI

I'm not about to say that there's nothing new under the sun, but parsers are a really well-understood problem where 99.9% of people don't need frontier knowledge and wouldn't be in a position to use it anyway.

And I don't think that people doing research on parsers would ever rely on LLMs for precisely that reason. But we're not parser researchers right?

[duendefm]

My point is, we have programming languages like C and C++, we have operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD, we have an empire of software and knowledge accumulated because of the intellectual battles fought by people before AI. With AI, we all are getting our coding easier (and are kind of being forced to), in a way that we will skip these kind of battles. That is, if we all use AI to make our job easier it will have some short term gain but we will end up as a whole ceasing to advance human knowledge with new stuff that has to come from real intellectual work. Like, I don't see people coming up with new outstanding technology if we all sucumb to be AI dependent.

[Daishiman]

I'm not really sure that I agree. The LLM paradigm basically allows for the same development techniques, for better or worse, but amplified.

So if you were lazily copying the first blog result in Google, getting the first answer from an LLM is equivalent, but the output is actually likely to be better.

If you wanted to do your research on various techniques and evaluate alternatives, LLMs can amplify your capacity to research and to have specific considerations for your specific problem.

LLMs aren't going to solve people's natural inclination towards laziness.

Additionally, while it's true that people may read and learn less about the "lower" levels of software plumbing, it enables enormous possibilities of higher level thinking that before were limited by the amount of manpower you needed.

For example, with LLMs I can try different test sharding strategies or trivially change from factories to fixtures in large test suites. This would have been busywork or drudgery; now I can evaluate several architectural solutions which would not have been possible before.

[jimbokun]

That can be said for any technology in history that made work easier.

“Whoa slow down with this ‘writing’ technology. No one will ever remember anything if they can just write it down.”