[llamatastic]

I really don't get the idea that LLMs somehow create value. They are burning value. We only get useful work out of them because they consume past work. They are wasteful and only useful in a very contrived context. They don't turn electricity and prompts into work, they turn electricity, prompts AND past work into lesser work.

How can anyone intellectually honest not see that? Same as burning fossil fuels is great and all except we're just burning past biomass and skewing the atmosphere contents dangerously in the process.

[simonw]

> How can anyone intellectually honest not see that?

The idea that they can only solve problems that they've seen before in their training data is one of these things that seems obviously true, but doesn't hold up once you consistently use them to solve new problems over time.

If you won't accept my anecdotal stories about this, consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance in two extremely well regarded academic competitions this year: the International Math Olympiad (IMO) and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

This is notable because both of those contests have brand new challenges created for them that have never been published before. They cannot be in the training data already!

[throw219080123]

> consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance

Yet ChatGPT 5 imagines API functions that are not there and cannot figure out basic solutions even when pointed to the original source code of libraries on GitHub.

[blibble]

> If you won't accept my anecdotal stories about this, consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance in two extremely well regarded academic competitions this year: the International Math Olympiad (IMO) and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

it's not a fair comparison

the competitions for humans are a display of ingenuity and intelligence because of the limited resources available to them

meanwhile for the "AI", all it does is demonstrate is that if you have a dozen billion dollar data-centres and a couple of hundred gigawatt hours, which can dedicate to brute-forcing a solution, then you can maybe match the level of one 18 year old, when you have a problem with a specific well known solution

(to be fair, a smart 18 year old)

and short of moores law lasting another 30 years, you won't be getting this from the dogshit LLMs on shatgpt.com

[numismatically]

"they output strings that didn't exit before" is some hardcore, uncut cope

[hansmayer]

It's not about being honest. It's about Joe Bullshit from the Bullshit-Department having it easier in his/her/theirs Bullshit Job. Because you see, Joe decided two decades ago to be an "office worker", to avoid the horrors of working honestly with your hands or mind in a real job, like electrician, plumber or surgeon. So his day consists of preparing powerpoints, putting together various Excel sheets, attending whatever bullshit meetings etc. Chances are you've met a lot of Joe Bullshits in your career, you may have even reported to some of them. Now imagine the exhilaration Joe feels when he touches these magic tools. Joe does not really care about his job or about his company. But suddenly Joe can reduce his pain and suffering in a boring-to-death-job while keeping those sweet paychecks. Of course Joe doesn't believe his bosses only need him until the magic machine is properly trained so he can be replaced and reduced to an Eloi, living off the UBI. Joe Bullshit is selfish. In the 1930s he blindly followed a maniacal dictator because the dictator gave him a sense of security (if you were in the majority population) and a job. There is unfortunately a lot of Joe Bullshits in this world. Not all of them work with Excel. Some of them became self-made "developers" in the last 10 years. I don't mean the honest folks who were interested in technology but never had the means to go to a university. I mean all those ghouls who switched careers after they learnt there was money to be made in IT and money was their main motivation. They don't really care about the meaning of it all, the beautiful abstractions your mind wanders through as you create entire universes in code. So they are happy to offload it too, well because it's just another bullshit job, for the Joe Bullshit. And since Joe Bullshit is in the majority, you my friend, with your noble thoughts, are unfortunately preaching to the wind.

[rhetocj23]

Jeez. Brutal but true.