“This code is giving me a return value of X instead of Y”

“Ah the reason you’re having trouble is because you initialized this list with brackets instead of new().”

“How would a syntax error give me an incorrect return”

“You’re right, thanks for correcting me!”

“Ok so like… The problem though.”

Ah, I guess I’ll have to question why I am lying to myself then. Don’t be a douchebag. Don’t use open source without respecting copyrights & licenses. The authors are already providing their work for free. Don’t shit on that legacy.

That statement is as dumb as it is non-sensical.

I know both LLM mechanisms better than you, it would appear, and my point is not so weak that I would have to fabricate a strawman that I then claim is what you said, to proceed to argue the strawman.

Using LLMs trained on other people’s source code is parasitic behaviour and violates copyrights and licenses.

You are right. My apologies, and my congratulations for finding the correct “tone” to respond to me ;) The thing is, I am absolutely fed up with especially the bullshit about snake oil vendors selling LLMs as “AI”, and I am much more fed up with corporations on a large scale getting away with - since it’s for profit - what I guess must already be called theft of intellectual property.

When people then use said LLMs to “develop software”, I’m kind of convinced they are about as gone mentally as the MAGA cult and sometimes I just want to vent. However, I chose the word parasite for a reason, because it’s a parasitic way of working: they use the work of other people, which for more specific algorithms, an LLM will reproduce more or less verbatim, while causing harm to such people by basically copy-pasting such code while omitting the license statement - thereby releasing such code (if open source) into the “wild” with an illegally(*) modified license.

• illegal of course only in such countries whose legal system respects copyright and license texts in the first place

Considering on top the damage done to the environment by the insane energy consumption for little to no gain, people should not be using LLMs at all. Not even outside coding. This is just another way to contribute missing our climate goals by a wide margin. Wasting energy like this - basically because people are too lazy to think for themselves - actually gets people killed due to extreme weather events.

So yeah, you have a valid point, but also, I am fed up with the egocentric bullshit world that social media has created and that has culminated in what will soon be a totalitarian regime in the country that once brought peace to Europe by defeating the Nazis and doing a PROPER reeducation of the people. Hooray for going off on a tangent…

But eventually, bubbles either deflate or pop, because eventually governments and investors will get tired of propping it up. It might take decades, but I think it’s inevitable.

I think Andreessen is lying and the “techno optimist manifesto” is a ruse for PR.

a16z has been involved in various crypto pump and dumps. They are smart enough to know that something like “play to earn” is not sustainable and always devolves into a pyramid scheme. Doesn’t stop them from getting in early and dumping worthless tokens on the marks.

The manifesto honestly reads like it was written by a teenager. The style, the tone, the excessive quotes from economists. This is pretty typical stuff for American oligarch polemics, no?

Yeah my management was all gungho about exploiting AI to do all sorts of stuff.

Like read. Not generative AI crap, but read. They came to us and said quite literally: “how can we use something like ChatGPT and make it read.”

I don’t know who or how they convinced them to use something that wasn’t generative AI, but it did convince me that managers think someone being convincing and confident is correct all the time.

No no, I disagree I think that shoving AI into all these apps is a solid plan on their behalf. People are going to stop recall and shut it off. So instead they put AI components into every app, It now has the right to overview everything you’re doing and every app collects data on you sending it home to update their personalized models for you so they can better sell you products.

That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.

learning is the basis of all known intelligence. LLMs have learned something very specific, AGI would need to be built by generalising the core functionality of learning not as an outgrowth of fully formed LLMs.

and yes the current approach is very much using a brick to open a lock and that’s why it’s … ahem … hit a brick wall.

shouldn’t it know what words are?

Not necessarily, but it should be smart enough to associate symbols with some form of meaning. It doesn’t do that, it juts associates symbols with related symbols, so if there’s nothing similar that already exists, it’s not going to be able to come back with anything sensible.

I think being able to create new content with partial sample data is necessary to really be considered general AI. That’s what humans do, and we don’t necessarily need the words to describe it.

Right, so AIs don’t really know what words are. All they see are tokens. The tokens could be words and letters, but they could also be image/video features, audio waveforms, or anything else.

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I know those terms. I wanted to edit it, but was too lazy. You still did understand what I meant, right?

We don’t call a shell script “AI” after all, and we do call those models that, while for your definition there shouldn’t be any difference.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

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Of course! It’s not like animals have jet engines!

Human brains are merely the proof that such energy efficiencies are possible for intelligence. It’s likely we can match or go far beyond that, probably not by emulating biology directly. (Though we certainly may use it as inspiration while we figure out the underlying principles.)