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Sure, but that's a separate claim, and I guess to my mind I dunno if we'll know how it shakes out for a few years, since everyone's still figure it out.

It does seem like a problem that these tools depend on humans to create new information that they can regurgitate and that they’re creating the economic conditions that will make those people even rarer than they already are

Yeah, I see that as a problem if the models don't develop, and I think in particular the effects on journalism are very concerning.

I do think some people really are weirdly ignoring the whole “LLMs can’t go out into the world and collect information that a human hasn’t already recorded and put on the internet” thing

If scraping is going to be allowed without regards to IP laws then we will just increasingly see locked down data made available only to subscribers and licensees. Everything will become silo’d in the future.

In biotech this drives me mad. You need RAs. You need bench scientists. You need data.

Ag sci tech: nobody has built a robot that'll go collect soil samples for nearly as cheap as my hourly rate. And I'll adjust sampling locations on the fly based on years of training and experience, for no additional cost, because that's how human brains work!

My father asked me why AI couldn’t just take over monitoring the weather and I was going “Okay. Let’s start with how exactly AI is going to place the weather stations…”

But that also goes back to “people do not understand how much actual manual labor goes into many things we take for granted.”

The people who use LLMs for travel planning are already running into this in that those LLMs can only exploit info a human has ready put into an accessible online system, and travel information is inherently constantly volatile and shifting

And currently LLMs seem to be depending on travel bloggers and online reviews but as they’re already killing travel bloggers businesses and I suspect that online reviews are declining rapidly…

Especially for travel to places that are generally fine but can get scary fast. I do a lot of work in Kingston, Jamaica which is a great city and so much fun, but whoa buddy I would not take advice from an LLM about where to go.

The self-pwning delusion of people like Musk and Kalnick is that somewhere in that mountain of data is a connection someone has missed, but LLMs can, with their massive connectivity of words alone, ferret out the one detail that grants FTL, or immortality, or a true moral basis for selfishness.

The precedent is mathematics. Modern mathematicians use highly diverse and seemingly unconnected parts of the discipline to craft proofs, like using hyperdimensional geometry as a foundation for Fermat's Last Theorem. They think there's something like that in physics or biology.

Discussed this recently. My buddy codes & told me AI will take over EVERYTHING. Because it codes really well. I said that it codes well because computer guys write what they know into AI & that it’s shit on anything that’s not already written. I could see that he’d legit never considered this.

this just has me questioning how well your buddy codes

The biggest limitation of LLMs is that the data ingestion rate they require to maintain relevance is greater than the rate humans produce data. They gobbled up all the information on the internet and need another internet's worth of new data NOW

I mean, you’re 50/50 on this, I think. Anything that does exist in online readable form, an LLM can consume, and their existence relies on us having done that to all relevant info consistently for 2 decades. However, they’re killing the incentive systems that made us do that so the future is unclear

yes that’s in fact exactly what I’ve been saying: lots of information in the world does not exist in online readable form and LLMs have no mechanism for collecting that information

yes, everybody is uncritically thinking “AI = magic” and assigning it whatever qualities they’d assign to magic

I used to work for a company that produced some creative work for clients. They'd use "design sprints" to have a group of people work together to hash out product specs. Invariably, the group effort tended toward consensus--meaning the most obvious and mundane solutions.

A large group rarely innovated. Instead it would gravitate to the middle, the median. AI is the same thing on a much larger scale. It is a probability engine, one that puts the most likely words, one after another, into a string. It's the average of a vast group of people.

*monkey paw curls * haha

I need to find the interview I saw with Erik Larson where he said that he does all of his own research because research assistants can't replace what he gets from his own research—a lot of his information for his books comes from tangents while he is doing his research

and an assistant can't know what he will find interesting and/or useful. And that's with a person so I'm not sure how AI can do that.

LLMs are inherently backwards looking. Not even Amazon has solved the "we see you bought a toilet, here's a dozen more toilets you might like" problem in traditional ML models. Even if they were somehow collect new data, they'd only look where they already got data from

From a development standpoint, the toilet thing should be easy to fix. They have a huge amount of data to show that most people buy, at most, 1 toilet and thus it is very unlikely that you would buy a second one It’s actively strange if this is a real and ongoing issue with one-time purchases

It is absolutely still a major issue.