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
People on HN have been claiming that LLMs are going to hit a wall any second now for the past two and a half years.
To reiterate, this is the very beginning of a long series of technological expansions that are going to come out of GenAI. The work is going to go on for decades. All you have to do is look at what happened with the mass-produced automobile, the personal computer, the internet, and mobile phones to see how long the propagation will continue before we settle into a new normal.
LLMs are really so new that the amount of exploration we've done on them is still tiny. It's also a field where a decade of work is being done every year. The vast majority of detractors I've seen always seem to be way way behind the latest models and even farther behind the papers coming out.
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 ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
To reiterate, this is the very beginning of a long series of technological expansions that are going to come out of GenAI. The work is going to go on for decades. All you have to do is look at what happened with the mass-produced automobile, the personal computer, the internet, and mobile phones to see how long the propagation will continue before we settle into a new normal.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗