[GrantMoyer]

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about.

The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

[jlarcombe]

Agree totally. Reminiscent of the Paul Erdös reaction to the proof of the Four Colour Problem.

It's been quite good reading these comments because a lot of them have put into words my own largely negative feelings about the AI ubiquitous hype, which I have found it hard to articulate. Your second paragraph, and someone else's comment about how they are attracted to computer science because they like fiddly detail and so are uninterested in a machine hiding all that, and a third comment about how so-called "busy work" is actually a good way of padding out difficult stuff and so a job of work becomes much less palatable when it is excised entirely.

The other thing I find deeply depressing is the degree to which people are thrilled (genuinely) by dreadful looking AI art and unbearable to read AI prose. Makes me think I've been kidding myself for years that people by and large have a degree of taste. Then again maybe it just means it's not to my taste..

[raincole]

> It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?

[GrantMoyer]

> if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?

On the contrary, I'm certain such a program would be filled with fascinating techniques, and I have no dread for the idea that humans aren't special.

[Glemkloksdjf]

Interesting that people seem to have this assumption.

"The lesson is considered "bitter" because it is less anthropocentric than many researchers expected and so they have been slow to accept it."

I mean we are so many people on the planet, its easy to feel useless when you know you can get replaced by millions of other humans. How is that different being replaced by a computer?

I was not sure how AGI would come to us, but I assumed there will be AGI in the future.

Weirdest thing for me is mathematics and physics: I assumed that would be such an easy field to find something 'new' through brute force alone, im more shocked that this is only happening now.

I realized with DeepMind and Alphafold that the smartest people with the best tools are in the industry and specificly in the it industry because they are a lot better using tools to help them than normal researchers who struggle writing code.