People are missing the point. We should all be much more skeptical, much more careful about how we evaluate the claims made by the people selling these products because we as humans are super vulnerable to the types of scams the author of this article describes. We all know someone that has fallen for a scam, been "cured" of a "disease" by someone whose just selling sugar pills, but we are blind to our own weakness for similar schemes. Surely we aren't that easily duped! Yet hacker news is now full of comments from people confidently predicting what is coming right around the corner, revering the Frontier Models, and defending every claim from OpenAI and Anthropic about how amazing their proprietary closed source secret sauce fueled product is.
The problem with people is we love to express in writing things we are ignorant about. Now, this helps us become less ignorant if we are introspective, but a lot of people are not doing it for that reason.
The fact that every new model generation has come with more capabilities should give the full skeptics at least a little pause that the foundations of their convictions may be incorrect.
It's not even clear that the actual LLMs have improved. It could be all the non-LLM software (harnesses), the system prompts, the sheer amount of compute hardware, etc. that makes them better. We could be quickly running up against a wall. The complete package of technology that is OpenAI's and Anthropic's products are completely opaque and proprietary. The psychic/con artist communication both from the LLM and the humans like Sam Altman only muddies the water further
>non-LLM software (harnesses), the system prompts, the sheer amount of compute hardware,
Eh, this is turning into a messy chinese room argument. It is the room or is it the system. In my philosophy the chinese room argument is a non-starter. It's not the room, it's the system. For LLMS this would be like arguing that the output of a single prompt has to be able to answer everything which is nothing close to how human intelligence works. A single human thought is rarely intelligent, it's most often a replay of information it already has. Dialectic processes and loop processes are what tends to push the limits of human intelligence. We reach local maxima with thought alone, and this is boosted by things like writing down the problem and having other humans that may be even less intelligent than you add to the process. In fact this process works with one self by writing and reading ones own thoughts as it's using different subsystems of the mind for introspection.
The idea that LLMs have ran out of steam typically show more of a lack of imagination in the writer than what's occurring in the field.
krupan · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
The fact that every new model generation has come with more capabilities should give the full skeptics at least a little pause that the foundations of their convictions may be incorrect.
krupan · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
Eh, this is turning into a messy chinese room argument. It is the room or is it the system. In my philosophy the chinese room argument is a non-starter. It's not the room, it's the system. For LLMS this would be like arguing that the output of a single prompt has to be able to answer everything which is nothing close to how human intelligence works. A single human thought is rarely intelligent, it's most often a replay of information it already has. Dialectic processes and loop processes are what tends to push the limits of human intelligence. We reach local maxima with thought alone, and this is boosted by things like writing down the problem and having other humans that may be even less intelligent than you add to the process. In fact this process works with one self by writing and reading ones own thoughts as it's using different subsystems of the mind for introspection.
The idea that LLMs have ran out of steam typically show more of a lack of imagination in the writer than what's occurring in the field.