this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".
like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"
this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but don't currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it "speak", then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly "engaged" with the idea of a person'd pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isn't there
(combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but they're not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)
https://mander.xyz/post/13749821 that's probably this not sure if it ever happened
Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.
how exactly did he get googly eyes on a pencil. big "then an eagle flew around the classroom" energy