All it needs to be is useful. Reading constant comments about LLMs can't be general intelligence or lack reasoning etc, to me seems like people witnessing the airplane and complaining that it isn't "real flying" because it isn't a bird flapping its wings (a large portion of the population held that point of view back then).
It doesn't need to be general intelligence for the rapid advancement of LLM capabilities to be the most societal shifting development in the past decades.
Aerospace is still a highly regulated area that requires training and responsibility. If parallels can be drawn here, they don’t look so cool for a regular guy.
They changed their mind after a public outcry including here on HN.
Do they really? I don't think they do.
> Planes can't land in your backyard so we built airports. We didn't abandon planes.
But then what do you do with the all the fantasies and hype about the new technology (like planes that land in your backyard and you fly them to work)?
And it's quite possible and fairly common that the new technology actually ends up being mostly hype, and there's actually no "airports" use case in the wings. I mean, how much did society "bend to the abilities of" NFTs?
And then what if the mature "airports" use case is actually something most people do not want?
Plastics, cars, planes, etc.
One could say that a balanced situation, where vested interests are put back in the box (close to impossible since it would mean fighting trillions of dollars), would mean that for example all 3 in the list above are used a lot less than we use them now, for example. And only used where truly appropriate.
To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal.
As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator
I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish.
This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination.
My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI.
Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore.
But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
To me it is more like there is someone jumping on a pogo ball while flapping their arms and saying that they are flying whenever they hop off the ground.
Skeptics say that they are not really flying, while adherents say that "with current pogo ball advancements, they will be flying any day now"
I understand that in this forum too many people are invested in putting lipstick on this particular pig.
Every person that believes that LLMs are near sentient or actually do a good job at reasoning is one more person handing over their responsibilities to a zero-accountability highly flawed robot. We've already seen LLMs generate bad legal documents, bad academic papers, and extremely bad code. Similar technology is making bad decisions about who to arrest, who to give loans to, who to hire, who to bomb, and who to refuse heart surgery for. Overconfident humans employing this tech for these purposes have been bamboozled by the lies from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al. It's crucial to call out overstatement and overhype about this tech wherever it crops up.
> All it needs to be is useful.
Computers were already useful.
The only definition we have for "intelligence" is human (or, generally, animal) intelligence. If LLMs aren't that, let's call it something else.
I don't think those that create AI care about that. They just to come out on top before someone else does.
That is a natural reaction to the incessant techbro, AIbro, marketing, and corporate lies that "AI" (or worse AGI) is a real thing, and can be directly compared to real humans.
There are people on this very thread saying it's better at reasoning than real humans (LOL) because it scored higher on some benchmark than humans... Yet this technology still can't reliably determine what number is circled, if two lines intersect, or count the letters in a word. (That said behaviour may have been somewhat finetuned out of newer models only reinforces the fact that the technology inherently not capable of understanding anything.)
I've been doing AI things for about 20+ years and llms are wild. We've gone from specialized things being pretty bad as those jobs to general purpose things better at that and everything else. The idea you could make and API call with "is this sarcasm?" and get a better than chance guess is incredible.
I think I count myself among the skeptics nowadays for that reason. And I say this as someone that thinks LLM is an interesting piece of technology, but with somewhat limited use and unclear economics.
If the hype was about "look at this thing that can parse natural language surprisingly well and generate coherent responses", I would be excited too. As someone that had to do natural language processing in the past, that is a damn hard task to solve, and LLMs excel at it.
But that is not the hype is it? We have people beating the drums of how this is just shy of taking the world by storm, and AGI is just around the corner, and it will revolutionize all economy and society and nothing will ever be the same.
So, yeah, it gets tiresome. I wish the hype would die down a little so this could be appreciated for what it is.
