FaceDeer

To do what? They had established that he was performing activities that needed to be stopped, he’s not owed more time to do those activities in.

Neither are forklifts. It’s an analogy, not exactly the same thing.

As I said, I can write programs in assembly language. I have actually done so, small trivial ones. I’m not a businessman, I’m a programmer. But I use compilers basically all the time because it would be ridiculous not to.

If an AI is able to break something in a way that no human can fix then I suppose that’s a sign that AI has exceeded human capabilities. Do you think it’s there yet?

And yet the person with the forklift is moving more stuff than the guy who did it by hand could manage. The “over” in “over-reliance” is a subjective value judgment and I just don’t agree.

I’m not seeing the problem here. Technology is developed specifically for this purpose, to remove unnecessary burden from humans and enhance their capabilities. There’s nothing noble about laboring unnecessarily hard to accomplish goals in a suboptimal manner. I could write programs in assembly language but instead I use high-level languages and compilers. Does that result in over-reliance on compilers?

John Henry died in the process of “beating” the steam hammer and then got replaced anyway. Nowadays it’d be considered foolish to do that work by hand.

And I could manually relocate all the contents of a palette, too. Just not anywhere near as quickly and easily as I can with a forklift. The analogy is still apt.

I physically can’t refactor a codebase in 15 minutes.

And ever since I got a forklift my arm strength has gone down.

You didn’t read the article or choose whether to post it?

What, have a nuanced view? Impossible, must be a troll.

I was told we would always be able to tell.

Unreliable is still a step up from completely absent.

And I bet someone is using an obsolete LLM or is failing to format their inputs correctly somewhere in the world right now too. Doesn’t change the reality that’s in front of me.

And yet the LLMs that I use actually do distinguish, in my actual real life experience.

So you’re telling me the sky is orange while I’m literally looking outside the window and seeing that it is not.

That thing you’re calling a fact is not in fact a fact.

We’re already there. I explained how modern LLMs can figure it out if they need to. But people who don’t like AI aren’t paying attention to the state of the art so the criticisms tend to lag like this.

Famously, yes. Accurately, no.

This is like the “AI can’t draw hands” thing. It used to be a problem and was frequently called out as a tell or mocked, but most art generators do it fine nowadays and it isn’t called out so much any more. The strawberry problem will follow the same trajectory.

Except I also explained how modern LLMs get around that problem. They’re not actually that easy to trip up.

The strawberry test shows more of a lack of knowledge in the tester than it does in the LLM. LLMs don’t see letters, they see tokens. When you type the word “Strawberry” what it actually sees is:

[3504, 1134, 19772]

Each token represents a chunk of the word. It’d need to separately memorize how many of each letter are in each token for it to just “know” how many "R"s are in there. That’s why modern LLMs either reason it out by spelling out the word letter by letter, or just writing a short script in an execution sandbox to count the letters that way.

Calling out LLMs for being poor at spelling is like challenging a colourblind person to say what colours a bunch of fruit are. They can often figure it out by other means but it’s more challenging than you’d think and it’s not a sign of poor intelligence if they get a few wrong.

I like how “as of my knowledge cutoff” implies that maybe the first 31 digits of pi might change someday.

It’s funny how people complain “don’t call it AI, it’s not intelligent like the examples we see in sci-fi!” And yet LLMs can already handle many tricks and challenges better than those sci-fi robots could. If I tell ChatGPT “everything I say is a lie” it’s got no problems with understanding that. Just the other day I had an interesting discussion with ChatGPT about the theory of humor and why it is that LLMs are better at understanding jokes than they are at coming up with them from scratch (but are still able to do so, just with difficulty).