castigatio

Wow - an open ended discursive AI that can help you refine your needs doesn't convert as frequently as a website promoting products? Go figure. This is ultimately a win for shoppers because AI gets in the way of the impulse to buy retailers spend so much money planting in people's minds.

I'm not sure where people think humans are getting these magical leaps of insight that transcend combinations of existing things. Magic? Ghost in the machine? The simplest explanation is that "leaps of insight" are simply novel combinations that demonstrate themselves to have some utility within the boundaries of a test case or objective.

Snow + stick + need to clean driveway = snow shovel. Snow shovel + hill + desire for fun = sled

At one point people were arguing that you could never get "true art" from linear programs. Now you get true art and people are arguing you can't get magical flashes of insight. The will to defend human intelligence / creativity is strong but the evidence is weak.

I agree about the value of general application. I do think though that we just don't have the tools to do many things LLM's can do - searching information in a nuanced way and getting nuanced responses is one thing.

Google search + LLM based search is far more effective than Google search alone. Google's stated mission has been to organize the world's information. Being able to ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for - and getting mostly useful responses - is more useful. Just one example among many. Simple natural language interaction with computer systems is huge. Just look at what LLM's are doing for robotics.

The argument doesn't work because whatever you think of where generative AI is taking us or not taking us - it is 100% demonstrably better at doing a wide range of tasks than other technologies we have available to us - even in its current exact form. Once computers started to be connected could we have stopped the development of the world wide web. If there's a way of getting humanity to collectively agree on things - please let's start by using it to stop climate change and create world peace before moving on to getting rid of LLM's.

We live in a world where there's a lot of talk about how AI might impact societies and economies - but little actual data. To me it seems very worthwhile to try to add 'any' data to that discussion and track how things change over time. Are reports of economic or labour trends pointless? Should companies not track how people use their products? I don't think it costs Anthropic much to do this - it's work for a couple of people to analyze their database.

C'mon folks. So many "expert opinions" and erudite references in these comments. The sciences of cognition, neurology, evolutionary psychology etc are all still muddling around trying to figure out how the human mind works. We're learning a lot about possible ways the mind might work from our observations of processes and outcomes of machine learning. It's a cool new paradigm to add to the mix. I really like the framing offered by the author. They're quite upfront about the fact that there's a lot of genetics involved. That all models are wrong but some are useful.

Why all the defensiveness? Whatever genetic aspects of our personalities and behaviours there are - there's still a pretty big component of just learning patterns. Language acquisition is like that. It's an innate thing but the languages we're exposed to as kids shape what patterns of language use we fall into.

Do you not understand probability? Or are you just suffering from confirmation bias?

But this person is just speaking the truth - I worked for an ISP with cable landing stations. These cables went down several times a year due to physical damage of non nefarious kinds. It's not obvious that this malicious. It certainly might be but it's not a slam dunk.

Well said.

I can understand the incentive for researchers to make provocative claims about the abilities or disabilities of LLM's at a moment in time when there's a lot of attention, money and froth circling a new technology.

I'm a little more stumped on the incentive for people (especially in tech?) to have strong negative opinions about the capabilities of LLM's. It's as if folks feel the need to hold some imaginary line around the sanctity of "true reasoning".

I'd love to see someone rigorously test human intelligence with the same kinds of approaches. You'd end up finding that humans in fact suck at reasoning, hallucinate frequently and show all kind of erratic behaviour in our processing of information. Yet somehow - we find other humans incredibly useful in our day to day lives.

It was a silly example - though not intended as serious. I agree - the distinctions you describe are useful. So what about the utility of increasingly granular description of oppression? Can you point me to the utility of these?

The people creating new generative AI models are inventing new words. I think their topic of research and the new words they are creating have high utility.

The authors of this paper on the other hand appear to me to not be applying discipline and rigour to solving hard problems. They are however trying to associate the words they have created in a discipline with little objective utility - with the words of a discipline that has high utility.

This strikes me as annoying and absurd. Why try to make the crossover unless you are trying to catch some shine off of a discipline that is getting a lot of well-justified attention?

I'm still waiting for Ilya to publish his first paper on gender studies..

I think this is a bit like coming up with words to expand on the concept of poop. Poop is a necessary and useful word. It describes something you get on your shoe. Or something you may have to suddenly rush out to do. However if I became so intensely immersed in the world of poop that I needed to invent new words to describe the subtleties of it - you might not admire my efforts or where I choose to place my attention. We have words like oppression that seem to be understood and to work well. Are we truly doing anything useful by breaking down the idea of oppression into ever more granular descriptions of it? I say - poop works fine.