I don't care if it's "intelligent", I don't care if it "has a mind". I don't care if it is "really reasoning", I don't care if it "understands". I don't care if it is "sentient" or "conscious".
None of this matters for the practical outcome.
You'd think that this has been understood over the last 4 years, but apparently it keeps circling back to this.
[Edit: I see that it was written back in 2023. Then (2023) should be added in the submission title]
If it generates functional output that works, then it works. And it works. It's not a psychic's con when it outputs Lean-verified proofs. It isn't a con when it can find and exploit zero-days.
The OP is still in the "denial" phase. Most I see are already in "anger" (a blurry fury against everything AI-shaped, from vague reasons piling on all "bad stuff" political reasons they already hated before) or "bargaining" (mathematicians scrambling to come up with a new definition of their job and retcon that it was always the main part anyway). A few are already in "depression" and feel like spectators on the Titanic, and the tiniest sliver is at "acceptance" with some kind of well-informed plan for their future.
The con is in how all those accomplishments have been presented to you. "Our LLM (not the one we let you use, a different one) did this amazing thing. No, we won't show you what training data we used, what prompts we used, what the harness was, how much human involvement there was, what hardware was involved, how much energy it took, or how much time it took. Just shut up and be amazed!"
Yes, I can also be amazed at the power of nuclear bombs even if they "don't let me use one" and I don't know how much energy it took.
You seem to be implying that achievements of internal models are exaggerated, but that's rather implausible. The public does have access to, for example, Opus and Fable, and so we know what those models are capable of - finding real vulnerabilities in multiple codebases, for example. If you extrapolate from these capabilities one more generation, you'll get pretty much the same feats that the internal models are claimed to be capable of - so why should we doubt those claims? It's not like they're claiming that their internal models developed psychic powers and learned to teleport - the claim is pretty much just "we have models a few months ahead of what we're making available, and in those months they've been improving at the same rate as usual".
You're claiming the frontier labs are lying about the capabilities of their next generation models. A reasonable person will expect that statement to be backed up by some verifiable evidence, given that we are several generations of models into this process and the capabilities are consistently increasing, often much more radically than people expected (remember "stochastic parrots"?)
Your post claims that they're lying and then throws out a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what they're doing behind the scenes.
If I were to steelman your argument, you're probably saying that the AI had a support system around it of people and training data and feedback that allowed it to achieve the breakthroughs that the labs are claiming. That actually seems perfectly reasonable, but in my mind it does not invalidate the advances they're announcing.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
None of this matters for the practical outcome.
You'd think that this has been understood over the last 4 years, but apparently it keeps circling back to this.
[Edit: I see that it was written back in 2023. Then (2023) should be added in the submission title]
If it generates functional output that works, then it works. And it works. It's not a psychic's con when it outputs Lean-verified proofs. It isn't a con when it can find and exploit zero-days.
The OP is still in the "denial" phase. Most I see are already in "anger" (a blurry fury against everything AI-shaped, from vague reasons piling on all "bad stuff" political reasons they already hated before) or "bargaining" (mathematicians scrambling to come up with a new definition of their job and retcon that it was always the main part anyway). A few are already in "depression" and feel like spectators on the Titanic, and the tiniest sliver is at "acceptance" with some kind of well-informed plan for their future.
krupan · · focus · HN ↗
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
stratos123 · · focus · HN ↗
krupan · · focus · HN ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
You're claiming the frontier labs are lying about the capabilities of their next generation models. A reasonable person will expect that statement to be backed up by some verifiable evidence, given that we are several generations of models into this process and the capabilities are consistently increasing, often much more radically than people expected (remember "stochastic parrots"?)
Your post claims that they're lying and then throws out a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what they're doing behind the scenes.
If I were to steelman your argument, you're probably saying that the AI had a support system around it of people and training data and feedback that allowed it to achieve the breakthroughs that the labs are claiming. That actually seems perfectly reasonable, but in my mind it does not invalidate the advances they're announcing.