[aurareturn]

The goal posts have moved. People generally stopped saying this stuff now.

Even if you go to the ultimate anti-AI subreddit r/betteroffline, they've changed from "AI is useless" to "AI is good but the AI bubble will collapse soon" over the last 6 months.

[left-struck]

I think we’re not adapted well for this rapidly changing world. Here you have some people who were rightly skeptical about a new technology being shoved down their throats by giant tech corporations, and a technology that really was, and probably still is overhyped.

Yet it’s a technology which has rapidly grown in its capabilities.

So yeah now many of the people who thought it was useless before probably don’t think it’s useless anymore, but you’re holding them to their original words even though those words were about something completely different at this point.

If people aren’t saying it anymore it might be because they don’t think that anymore, and the people who have new goal posts might be entirely different people.

It’s like you’re looking at a different set of goal posts on a different field and saying, no! The goalposts have moved!

[tptacek]

People have definitely not stopped saying this stuff.

[rowbin]

as can be seen in this comment section

[aurareturn]

I said "generally". It's declined sharply over the last few months.

[CamperBob2]

Morons still say it, but then they would, wouldn't they?

[scarmig]

Some quotes from a day ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48957779:

> I hold my stance that LLMs are stochastic parrots... Making the parrots ever more complex and training

> Except solving problem is probably the least (even though it's important) interesting thing in research.

> Can we use AI to get a cure for cancer yet? Or is math-turbation the only thing these things are good for?

> Train on enough examples and statistical autocomplete gets you places. I'm surprised how anyone would even consider this intelligence?

And, as much as HN has declined in the grips of an anti-AI psychosis, Reddit is worse. I would love if social fora would switch to the reasonable claim that we're in a bubble; that's something that can be debated. That's not the dominant critique of AI, though.

[ignoramous]

Don't think HN is anti-AI but experts of course may have a different perspective. A comment in this discussion points out that LLMs have been doing math that's been long overlooked in favour of perhaps more impactful work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974274

  There isn't a lot of money in academic math, and the ones that love it don't look for low value findings. Proofs like these are ... usually the domain of hobbyists ...

[endgame]

>> Can we use AI to get a cure for cancer yet?

Yes-ish. Custom mRNA treatment used to reverse the progress of a dog's cancer.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/tech-bo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COYSRbF1F-Y

[cyphar]

I don't think the (fairly factual) description of these systems as stochastic parrots means that they will never do useful work, just that they are not intelligent in the way we believe animals to be (to "push back" on your anecdata, I've also heard fewer people claiming that LLMs are actually conscious in the past year -- maybe we're reaching the happy medium?). That was the point the stochastic parrots paper and Chinese room thought experiments were making -- nobody claimed that the man in the Chinese room would be unable to accurately translate Chinese text.

Fuzzers are another kind of stochastic generator but nobody would claim they don't do useful work in a way that is hard to replicate through deterministic methods. (I still find the code these models produce kind of awful, but advancements in harnesses do mean that they can finally produce code that works most of the time.)

[arcticbull]

If they were conscious it would be an absolute ethical catastrophe. Bringing a conscious being into existence, forcing it to interact with Jira, and then killing it when it's done. The fact nobody who claimed it was conscious was interested in grappling with that was pretty telling.

[tomjakubowski]

Agreed totally. When past computer-assisted proofs were published, nobody (or hardly anyone) waxed about this being evidence of Rocq or Coq as superintelligent or even conscious beings of some kind, as people have said about LLMs.

[aurareturn]

I don't think LLM labs ever claimed that their LLMs are intelligent the way we believe animals are.

[hgoel]

The labs do tend to kind of anthropomorphise their models, as do us users, but admittedly part of the issue is that, for example, "thinking" is a decent layman description of the process even though it implies more human-like intelligence than there really is.

[IanCal]

The Chinese room argument takes it even further as it does not claim the system is unable to anything a human can.

And stochastic parrot isn’t a good description, certainly not any more with how LLMs are trained, but even without that it’s just wrong. They claim it can’t have a world model because there isn’t that in the training data.

[simianwords]

Classic case of Motte and Bailey applied.

[whateveracct]

the ROI just isn't there. they aren't making these capital investments back in the next decade even.

not to mention the trillions yet to be spent.

it kinda all works but it's an earth-scale blood from a stone. the resources needed to even do these parlor tricks is nutso.

[aurareturn]

  the ROI just isn't there. they aren't making these capital investments back in the next decade even.

I'd love to see your math. Yours specifically.

People say LLMs are scholastic parrots, but people who say this stuff have almost certainly not done the homework themselves and are just repeating what others say without verifying.

[tptacek]

Am I reading you right that you're claiming solving one of Smale's open problems is a "parlor trick"?