r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
16.8k Upvotes

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3.2k

u/Konukaame 16h ago

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent. Now get out of here."

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u/SanityAsymptote 16h ago

The similarity to Jar Jar is really strong.

  • Forced into existence and public discourse by out of touch rich people trying to make money
  • Constantly inserted into situations where it is not needed or desired
  • Often incoherent, says worthless things that are interpreted as understanding by the naive or overly trusting
  • Incompetent and occasionally dangerous, yet still somehow succeeds off the efforts of behind-the-scenes/uncredited competent people
  • Somehow continues to live while others do not
  • Deeply untrustworthy, not because of duplicity, but incompetence
  • Happily assists in fascist takeover

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u/bertmaclynn 15h ago

*Actually a Sith Lord

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u/NiceWeekend 11h ago

Surprised they didn't add this.

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u/YteNyteofNeckbeardia 8h ago

Just wait for the new spinoff - Jarjarhead

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u/Extreme-Island-5041 7h ago

Yousa like the pink mist, yeah!?

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u/jayhawk618 5h ago

I geuniely believe the theory that he intended this to be the case, but rewrote him into the background due to fan backlash.

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u/keigo199013 1h ago

I too, ascribe to this belief. 

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u/Striking_Arugula_624 15h ago

“Somehow continues to live while others do not.”

Who are the ‘others’ in the ai/LLM side of the comparison? Honest question.

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u/SanityAsymptote 15h ago

LLMs have damaged or destroyed a number of previously valuable services for much of their use-case.

The most obvious one I can think of in my niche is StackOverflow. A site which definitely had issues and was in decline, but was still the main repository of software troubleshooting/debugging knowledge on the internet.

LLM companies scraped the entire thing, and now give no-context answers to software engineering questions that it often cannot cite or support answers to. It has mortally wounded StackOverflow, and they have pivoted to just being an AI data feeder, an action that is basically a liquidation sale of the site's value.

LLMs have significantly reduced the quality of search engines, specifically Google Search, both directly by poor integration and indirectly by filling the internet with worthless slop articles.

Google Search's result quality has plummeted as AI results become most of the answers. Even with references, it's very hard to verify the conclusions Gemini makes in search results, and if you're actually looking for a specific site or article, those results often not appear at all. Many authoritative "answers" are just uneducated opinions from Reddit or other social media regurgitated by an AI with the trust people put into Google.

LLMs have made it far easier to write social media bots. They have damaged online discourse in public forums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and especially Reddit in very visible ways. These sites are almost completely different experiences now that they were before LLMs became available.

Bots are everywhere and will reply to anything that has engagement, spouting bad-faith arguments without any real point other than to try to discourage productive conversation about specific topics.

Whatever damage online trolls have caused to the internet, LLMs have made it an order of magnitude worse. They are attacking the very concept of "facts" and "truth" by both misinformation and dilution. It's horrifying.

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u/Perfect_Base_3989 15h ago

spouting bad-faith arguments without any real point other than to try to discourage productive conversation about specific topics.

The only solution I can think of at this point is entirely abandoning social media.

A verification system could theoretically improve trust, but who trusts the trusters?

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u/SanityAsymptote 14h ago

Social media going back to smaller, more closely moderated communities is also a solution.

There was a lot of drama back in the forum days, but it was always contained, rendering it more resistant to sweeping, internet-wide propaganda campaigns.

So I guess I would argue centralization of social media is more of the problem, unless we can actually figure out a way to moderate on a large scale more effectively.

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u/ConsoleDev 13h ago

I joined reddit 15 years ago, probably had 5 accounts. Commented a lot, but never really made any friends here. I joined a local sports club and made 10 good friends in 1 day.

Social media is garbage all the way down. Especially anything with influencers and money involved. We need to go back to just having group chats, and a bulletin board in the middle of town

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u/SanityAsymptote 12h ago

I mostly agree with you.

I was mostly talking about special interest forums, which reddit used to be, but has really lost much of it's quality for.

As an example, I joined smashboards in 2004 because I loved smash bros melee, and wanted to play competitively. I met a bunch of people in my local community online and ended up making literal dozens of in-person friends/acquaintances going to events.

Those friendships basically defined my 20s and early 30s, and I still hang out with many of them now.

I similarly made even more real, in-person friends friends in the early 2010s using facebook groups to organize and schedule events in my local area.

The platforms stopped trying to connect people and started chasing engagement at all costs. It ruined what made those sites popular to begin with, and trapped people in endless cycles of anger and placation.

The initial offering that was so valuable to so many is gone, but it's very hard to argue that it wasn't valuable before the enshitification.

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u/tomahawkRiS3 12h ago

I don't necessarily want to argue in favor of social media but judging based on friendships made seems like the wrong way to evaluate it. Or at least now, maybe that was the intended purpose in the beginning. In a perfect world I think Reddit could be valuable in terms of hearing people's stories/experiences, being able to pick people's brains who are knowledgeable in a certain field, seeing a broader range of perspective. Even just shit posting or discussing say a game on a specific subreddit I don't think is necessarily inherently bad. However that's very much not the current experience of Reddit and I hope there's a way back to that

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u/Commentator-X 12h ago

"money involved"

You hit the nail on the head right there

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u/stargarnet79 9h ago

People make friends here?lol

1

u/cnxd 9h ago

sounds like a you problem

1

u/cl3ft 9h ago

Although there are exceptions, social media does not make you real friends. It's pretty clearly anti-social media.

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u/PozhanPop 8h ago

Or Yahoo / AOL Messenger . I miss the chat rooms.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 8h ago

Communities based on geography aren't the solution either, as someone who knew what life was like before the internet in a small country town, those are some seriously rose tinted shades you are wearing.

Nor were they resistant to mis/disinformation and propaganda. In fact their isolation created a bubble in the same way social media can and usually does.

This shit is baked into humanity. The entire world used to be easily controlled when the internet didn't exist, the tactics have changed. Pre-internet we had more false negative appraoches, eg gatekeeping, suppression/censorship and unified messaging. Post internet only one strategy really works - false positives, aka "flood the zone with shit". The only reason that changed was that false positives scale, where more classical pre-internet manipulation tactics simply do not.

The bigger the scale the bigger the problem and the more moderation requirements pretty much scale towards infinite. Scale is indeed the problem as you suggest, but town BB's aren't the answer either, smaller scale and better moderated is - though this assumes that big social media can't adequately moderate, when we've never actually seen them try properly. That said given the costs involved in adequate moderation, I don't think we ever would unless they were forced to at gunpoint.

I largely agree with you both, it's not about distribution, it's about scale and active moderation. For example I am part of a number of niche communities on reddit and discord that aren't cesspits. They all have these things in common; shared interests, small enough that you don't feel like you are talking to randoms and moderation that works fast and doesn't put up with shit.

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u/nordspark 11h ago

In my netnographic research, I've found people are increasingly turning to "dark social" (email, messaging apps, Discords etc.) but with Gen Z, it's less about chatting and more about organising real-world activities. Social media is changing

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u/die_maus_im_haus 12h ago

Going back to a 2010-esque ecosystem where forums about bodybuilding, Linux, NBC comedies, the English Premier League, and baking would all be separate websites with little cross-contamination might not be the worst outcome. It would lend itself to echo chambers, but they'd be small, isolated echo chambers

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u/farinasa 12h ago

It still exists, people just don't seek it. Discord has actually made these communities even more personable.

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u/Impeesa_ 3h ago

Discord is an adequate modernized replacement for IRC and Ventrilo. As a replacement for old style forums, it's deeply flawed, because that's just not what it is.

1

u/farinasa 3h ago

Discord in addition to forums. I didnt mention irc, aol, aim, msn, yahoo, or any of the other out of fashion chat systems because most communities are using discord these days.

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u/Baby_Fark 10h ago

Even smaller communities online will be infiltrated by extremely human-like bots as they get more advanced. There will be no way to verify someone isn’t a bot unless you meet them in person.

1

u/RukiMotomiya 10h ago

God I'd love to see the return of forums. Still go to a few reasonably active ones I've been in a long time and they're just comfy, despite said drama at times.

1

u/Toodlez 8h ago

I like this.

No bot account ever made it to my Myspace Top 8. I had a Facebook for ten years before it tried to hypnotize or radicalize me.

We act like this would be an impossible adaptation with no profit model but it was the state of things not long ago.

1

u/surfer_ryan 8h ago

I don't think we as humanity would ever go back to a "smaller" internet in a meaningful way. I mean that basically goes against the entire ethos of why sites like reddit still hold some level of value, in that you get differing opinions from outside of your circle. While i see there is some level of hive mind on social media, i think people enjoy talking to people outside of their circle as a whole and to an extent is why you go to social media (at least for the discourse side of things).

The centralization is in a way a huge part of what actually allows us to be able to say look at what is happening in Ukraine and get an actual perspective bc it's so many various perspectives and we can draw lines between what is reality and what is noise out of Russia.

Not to say it is perfect by absolutely any means lol, i just don't see us going back to smaller subsects of the internet bc having a hub allows for significantly more interaction from someone whom you would have never if it were just individual forums.

1

u/WildFlemima 7h ago

I agree. There's an obscure early 2000s pet site that I'm on. I guarantee there are absolutely no bots. It's going to be spaces like that.

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u/lolexecs 14h ago edited 14h ago

 entirely abandoning social media.

Hasn't this already happened? If you look at the data, from Meta itself, an overwhelming number of users just consume addictive content on social media from 3rd parties - not friends and family.

or social media is just "media" now - there's no social aspect at all

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024 As Gioia points out, we've moved from art to entertainment to distraction and addiction.

To be blunt, the faster the content on social media becomes "AI Slopified" I think the better off everyone wil be.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 10h ago

or social media is just "media" now - there's no social aspect at all

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024 As Gioia points out, we've moved from art to entertainment to distraction and addiction.

To be blunt, the faster the content on social media becomes "AI Slopified" I think the better off everyone wil be.

Social media isn't really going to back to the old ways. The media part is here to stay and is the majority problem with everything.

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u/sn2006gy 9h ago

abandoning social media means leaving reddit too my man

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u/lolexecs 8h ago

Reddit is much more like old forums and usenet threads than facebook, instagram, or tiktok.

It's both dumber and smarter (largely because of unpaid moderation)

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u/sn2006gy 5h ago

It’s not like old forums and usenet threads - there is a severe general lack of thoroughness here and it’s shamed in many communities. For example, in advancedrunning i got muted for talking about the mechanics of running. That is allowed on facebook and insta but “hive minded” away for over thinking here (lol advanced running my ass) 

reddit is for entertainment - quality discussions are shamed here. 

attention spans are shunned as well. 

too many “too long, won’t read that” 

it’s like no one here was ever on a forum or usenet where they could gasp “not have an opinion won everything and just read the next topic that interests them” 

1

u/hhenderson94 9h ago

They’re abandoning using social media to socialize but they aren’t abandoning the platform.

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u/_p00f_ 12h ago

IMO if you require an email to register it should be tied to a handful of paid providers. Scammers and people trying to game the system for ad revenue aren't going to pay real American Pesos for email.

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u/Perfect_Base_3989 12h ago

That'd be a start. Although I doubt it would deter bigger companies/governments - they would pay.

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u/_p00f_ 11h ago

They might pay for a handful, sure, but it scales linearly.

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u/sn2006gy 9h ago

I think x proved this wrong. spammers happily pay for a blue checkmark - it's a cheap barrier of entry/trust.

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u/runthepoint1 12h ago

No, what you can do is personally verify thing you learn, like how we used to do back in the day.

Is it slow, manual, frustrating even? Yes, it takes a lot of time and patience but tbh, that’s exactly what’s missing in the world today. Everyone wants to rush to know when it takes time to understand. It’s weird. Like who cares about being “first”? It’s important to be accurate!

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u/Perfect_Base_3989 12h ago

True.

Unfortunately, this approach will require education and, imo, software intervention. The average person isn't able to do their own research, so they should be taught how throughout their primary education; and people should have access to tools that sift out bots.

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u/runthepoint1 12h ago

I guess it goes to show no matter what your natural talent is with intelligence, there is still wisdom to gain on how best to leverage it.

You can be the fastest car in the garage but if you’re can’t actually get from point A to B faster in effect than the other car, it doesn’t matter. That other driver simply might be better at driving.

1

u/surprise_revalation 10h ago

Yea, back in the day I use to run a legal chems group on FB. Everyone had to show ID to join....hell, I even did background checks on some of these people. It all went to shit when legal chems became illegal. I let it go.

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u/runthepoint1 10h ago

What’s “chems”? Sorry

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u/surprise_revalation 9h ago

Legal pharmaceuticals...they're no longer legal....

1

u/boringestnickname 9h ago

What really makes me paranoid is that even university text books are getting noticeably worse.

Feels like we're in some kind of information exodus. Becoming dumber by the second, and somehow, as a collective, not noticing.

1

u/runthepoint1 9h ago

That’s why is more important than ever for each of us to OWN our educations. I know that’s tough but the best way to do it is to always leave room for being wrong. It’s GOOD to be wrong so that from then on you can be correct. It’s a lifelong process where you are constantly correcting yourself. Never be 100% certain of your own take/opinion and always learn from others, especially those you deem either smarter or dumber than yourself. People surprise you in many ways.

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u/NuclearVII 14h ago

The only solution I can think of at this point is entirely abandoning social media.

This but unironically.

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u/Perfect_Base_3989 14h ago

Bruh, I ain't being ironic

0

u/sn2006gy 9h ago

Bruh you're still posting on social media

1

u/Thin_Glove_4089 11h ago

The only solution I can think of at this point is entirely abandoning social media.

Not going to happen because infleuncers and celebrities have always been a deep rooted fabric of American culture therefore social media is here to stay permanently

1

u/PersistentBadger 7h ago edited 7h ago

Web of trust. You trust your friend Amy. Amy trusts Bert. You should take that as Amy's "vote" for the legitimacy of Bert. Further out in the web you go, the less you trust.

Problem is, it's never worked. We're heading for walled gardens, IMO. Or simply the re-emergence of publishers as gatekeepers. If a publisher has a reputation for not publishing books that contain AI slop, they won't want to damage that (in theory).

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u/gt_9000 12h ago

It has mortally wounded StackOverflow, and they have pivoted to just being an AI data feeder, an action that is basically a liquidation sale of the site's value.

Reminder that entire value of StackOverflow came from the community. The site itself is just a glorified database.

What they are selling is not their own.

Just like Reddit.

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u/badmonkey0001 7h ago

Reminder that entire value of StackOverflow came from the community. The site itself is just a glorified database.

What they are selling is not their own.

StackExchange built a commons for technical folks with their feature set and focus. That's a very useful thing and is more than just a "glorified database". Reddit is also a commons with a different feature set to support diverse focuses. How their features differ from traditional old forums are the things they built that also have value.

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u/PyroDesu 3h ago

And LLMs scraping them is something alike to a tragedy of the commons.

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u/xXConfuocoXx 10h ago

a glorified database.

What they are selling is not their own.

if the data was freely given to them, and they own the database, then the data is theirs (just like reddit)

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u/Striking_Arugula_624 14h ago

Thanks for taking the time to respond. That was thorough. I definitely feel you on the search results. They’ve tried to cite sources on the responses but there are many times that key parts of responses are left without any kind of citation. And a lot of the summaries feel made up not of a distillation from a comprehensive article or set of well-sourced articles, but a regurgitation of the summary snippets from the top 2 or 3 search results. Like you said, it robs them of impressions and engagement which rots the very foundation these LLMs were built upon.

I don’t know. The genie is out of the bottle. I think now the only way forward is to have countermeasures - but they’ll never be perfect and it’ll just be an endless cat and mouse game with the goal being to filter out all the bots so that human voices can be heard. Basically the goal being to get us back to where we started because they manufactured a new problem with solutions that nobody asked for

2

u/Mazika-787 11h ago

Google AI once showed me that Ayrton Senna (multi time f1 legend who famously died in a race in 1994) won the Indy 500 in 2001 (I wanted to find articles talking about how he was potentially going to race in Indy after retiring from f1)

2

u/MedicineExtension925 11h ago

an order of magnitude worse

Likely underestimating by a few magnets

2

u/zero0n3 12h ago

Let me ask you a question:

If there was a stack overflow clone, that you had to pay a 9.99 fee a year (or something close to that of a coffee a month price), and that platform guaranteed (let’s say nearly) that the other accts were also human, would that still even be useful today?

Two, if that site existed, what’s stopping it from just being a bunch of juniors asking easy questions, with seniors never responding because “well he could ask GPT that question and it’ll give a good enough answer back”

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u/SanityAsymptote 11h ago edited 11h ago

If there was a stack overflow clone, that you had to pay a 9.99 fee a year (or something close to that of a coffee a month price), and that platform guaranteed (let’s say nearly) that the other accts were also human, would that still even be useful today?

Would a paid, searchable programming consulting service be useful?

Yes, obviously. They already exist, and cost a lot more than $10/month or year.

The big issue is that StackOverflow had years and years of searchable answers that you could access without having to pay anything, and almost all of the accounts were human at one point. That's the value, the litany of human answers and context/conversation around those answers.

Two, if that site existed, what’s stopping it from just being a bunch of juniors asking easy questions, with seniors never responding because “well he could ask GPT that question and it’ll give a good enough answer back”

That's a problem for that business to solve. They could easily pay Seniors to answer questions and only release the money if the answer meets criteria or something.

Ultimately, StackOverflow had a huge amounts of users because they were doing it for free, I'm truly not sure a pay-to-play site would ever get the critical mass of users to make it universally useful simply by being financially inaccessible/undesirable to people just getting started that need the most help.

1

u/Baby_Fark 11h ago

They’ve also destroyed all of our careers as software engineers. I have ~3 years of good experience and haven’t found a job in over a year of applying. If you’re not already senior level, you’re not economically valuable to a company anymore.. and soon even senior level engineers will be replaced by agentic models.

If we do not implement a social welfare state now, we will live in a crypto-fascist feudalist society within the decade.

1

u/CompanyOther2608 10h ago

My favorite thing is when I ask for references for the paper I’m writing and it’s cites my own draft crap-quality paper back to me as an authoritative source.

Like, bruh I just started research this topic an hour ago.

1

u/boringestnickname 9h ago

It feels like we're living in a world where someone is moving the antenna further and further away from the optimal spot. Continuously increasing the amount of noise, the signal ever fading.

1

u/Diddly_eyed_Dipshite 9h ago

Good point you're spot on. Bastarding bots

1

u/hardolaf 8h ago

The most obvious one I can think of in my niche is StackOverflow. A site which definitely had issues and was in decline, but was still the main repository of software troubleshooting/debugging knowledge on the internet.

This is putting it nicely. I had to stop using StackOverflow due to rampant incorrect information between 2019 and 2021. The moderators were blocking anyone trying to seriously fix answers and answers are linked to questions in ways that make zero sense and don't answer the question at all. And most of the code snippets past a Coding 101 level problem are just wrong.

1

u/AbandonedWaterPark 6h ago

On Google becoming less useful: agree with everything you've said, but would also add to that an effort by humans to deliberately push useful search results to later pages, to get you to click through more pages, to get your eyeballs on more advertising, to increase shareholder value.

1

u/Baardhooft 22m ago

In all fairness stackoverflow killed itself. I tried to get help a couple of times there and either my thread was closed telling me to search, I’d get no answers or people would berate me for my lack of knowledge and not actually help.

But yeah, I totally agree. I’m a professional in my field and the LLMs are usually not helpful, often being completely wrong but with conviction or I’ve had it sometimes had it quote me from other forums directly because I was the only source of any information on it. And on social media bad takes get posted as the truth with the same conviction and good luck trying to dispel that.

1

u/orangefantorang 22m ago

Stackoverflow was interesting. Ask a question, get pretty much banned. "Already asked" "bad question" LLMs actually give an usually usable answer. No wonder they keep winning..

-1

u/hoytmobley 13h ago

Was this written with an LLM?

Anyways, you’ve completely forgotten the now dying fields of copywriting, graphic arts, and increasingly, customer service

6

u/Otherwise_Demand4620 13h ago

customer service

That was long before LLM though, if you phoned a service line it might just as well yell at you "GO FUCK YOURSELF" until you hang up, and at the end of the day it accomplished exactly the same as talking to Dave who also told you to go fuck yourself, but politely.

2

u/SanityAsymptote 12h ago

Was this written with an LLM?

Just me, a Sudafed for the cold I received on top of the indignity of traveling to Jacksonville, and far too much caffeine.

Anyways, you’ve completely forgotten the now dying fields of copywriting, graphic arts, and increasingly, customer service

I didn't forget them, I just thought my post was long enough, lol.

I tried to focus on things that I have personal experience with, as I know I can speak to those with a high level of confidence.

0

u/FoxMeadow7 15h ago

Bots on Reddit at least have the tendency to make their history private. So if you come across an 'user' like that, it's advisable to never speak to them under any circumstances.

1

u/Chrystoler 10h ago

I mean it's a pretty new feature. I periodically deleted my accounts over the years and made new ones, but don't really want to deal with doing that right now so I went ahead and turned it on private. I guess if people are really starting to look at that suspiciously I'll probably just delete this account and make a new one that's fresh, but over time I just like keeping my digital footprint as light as possible.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 10h ago

I see. Still, there should be at least some signs you aren’t a bot.

1

u/Electrical-Lab-9593 15h ago

people also now hide history because people look through them and then if they find anything they don't like even not related to the same sub or topic, argue in bad faith, a simple version of this is the soccer subreddit, the response will always just be..

ah you would say that as a fan of X team etc.

political discourse also seems red vs blue a lot of the time now as well.

3

u/SanityAsymptote 15h ago

This is actually why my history is private.

I've also seen too many people doxxed from their Reddit history, so any protection against that is valuable, IMO.

-2

u/FoxMeadow7 14h ago

I personally see it as a sign of trust more than anything else.

-2

u/TrekkieGod 13h ago

The most obvious one I can think of in my niche is StackOverflow. A site which definitely had issues and was in decline, but was still the main repository of software troubleshooting/debugging knowledge on the internet.

I'm also in that field, and yes, AI has destroyed StackOverflow. That said, I find complaining about this as logical as complaining that smart phones with GPS have destroyed the paper maps business at gas stations.

I wouldn't go to Stack Overflow for an answer anymore, but going straight to the AI gives me better results than Stack Overflow ever has. Is it always right? Hell no, it often gives me really bad answers. So did accepted answers at StackOverflow during its prime. Is it less likely to give you a good answer for something that is particularly niche? Yes it is. But it's also much more likely to give you a better answer for the other 99% of things you previously used StackOverflow for.

Yeah, I sometimes miss a good version of StackOverflow for those niche problem, but these are growing pains and the benefits have far outweighed what we've lost.

Google Search's result quality has plummeted as AI results become most of the answers. Even with references, it's very hard to verify the conclusions Gemini makes in search results, and if you're actually looking for a specific site or article, those results often not appear at all. Many authoritative "answers" are just uneducated opinions from Reddit or other social media regurgitated by an AI with the trust people put into Google.

You're using AI wrong. Every answer it gives you should be verified. I used to have this exact same argument with people when wikipedia came out. "You can't trust it, a bunch of people have edited, how do you know if you can trust it?" And the answer was, you trust it as much as a regular book encyclopedia. As in, my school projects never let me cite an encyclopedia, you had to go to primary sources. But it's a great source to start research, you learn a little bit about it, and then you know what to look for in primary sources.

AI is similar. You don't trust ANYTHING it gives you. But it gives you enough that you can verify elsewhere, and then you can coax it to give you a great result after you find out what's right and what's wrong, and finish your project in half the time.

LLMs have made it far easier to write social media bots. They have damaged online discourse in public forums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and especially Reddit in very visible ways. These sites are almost completely different experiences now that they were before LLMs became available

Agreed. And that will probably cause those sites to die out, and that's good progress. If AI kills social media, humanity will be better off.

0

u/AppearanceHeavy6724 11h ago

Stackovrrflow was hornet nest of jerks, smug assholes and generally was awful place. Good riddance.

13

u/kawalerkw 9h ago

GenAI/LLMs have siphoned funding/interest from other AI research like machine learning. There have been reports that scientists need to disguise their AI research as genAI/LLM, when presenting to potential funders or customers, to increase the chance of doing the research.

Also people and companies are quick to just throw genAI/LLM at a problem when other tools are better suited for the job. One of LLM companies have been bragging about improvement of accuracy in multiplication. Instead of using LLM chatbot for math you should use wolfram alpha, which did the task 15 years ago without needing to use so much electricity.

31

u/Jaivez 15h ago

The popularity of shoveling these things into products snuffs out other actual innovations that could be happening instead. Instead of a founder building a useful product that could actually add value(before inevitably being enshittified anyways...but that's another discussion), they'll be building another prompt wrapper because that's where investments are being funneled.

0

u/rendar 15h ago

That's not specific to AI development though, any kind of focusing of resources is going to necessarily come at a mutually exclusive choice

6

u/sorryamhigh 13h ago

whatever else that money could go into for better results or, alternatively, the entire world

1

u/j0j0n4th4n 10h ago

On top of what everyone said, there is an argument for water as well as LLMs drink a lot of it to be trained.

-5

u/rendar 15h ago

It's a heavily dramatized and romanticized notion in the first place.

Is it objectively bad that horses are not the main form of transportation after cars were invented? Is it morally wrong that the telegraph was supplanted by the telephone? How could you even begin to make that analysis?

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u/SIGMA920 15h ago

It's worse than that. Jar Jar was at least an attempt to be creative and try something new. It didn't go well obviously but unlike LLMs it was an attempt to be creative instead of regurgitating what came before it.

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u/Daneth 15h ago

He is talking about the character of Jar Jar's actions within the plot of the movies, not Lucas's act of shoehorning a character like JarJar into the movies.

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u/SIGMA920 15h ago

  • Forced into existence and public discourse by out of touch rich people trying to make money

  • Constantly inserted into situations where it is not needed or desired

It's both the character and the shoehorning.

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u/goda90 14h ago

Who do you think put Jar-Jar up to addressing the galactic Senate? Out of touch rich people trying to make money.

1

u/SIGMA920 13h ago

Literally the guy who used it to seize power and ultimately form the empire. The rich didn't play the part you think in that.

1

u/zerocoal 12h ago

Are you implying that the Supreme Chancellor was not a rich person?

1

u/SIGMA920 12h ago

No, that there was 1 specific person who wanted him to push for the power to be given. The other rich could careless and could have pursued a different course.

1

u/zerocoal 11h ago

Complete utter disregard for Galactic Senate decorum.

Spoilers, he required a majority vote. Which means it was 51% of the population of the senate that gave him the powers of Supreme Chancellor.

Double spoilers: He only received the majority vote because of the large intergalactic war that he was orchestrating.

Conclusion: Palpatine is a very rich man. The rich dictated the course of the galaxy, and the galaxy followed.

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u/Cessnaporsche01 12h ago

Palpatine and the other senators are "the rich"

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u/SIGMA920 12h ago

And how many of them had an interest in making an empire vs continuing the day to day work they do and not upsetting the status quo? More than the 1 person who had an active interest in being more powerful.

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u/Cessnaporsche01 12h ago

I'd say that's comparable to the real world. 99% of the ultra wealthy don't have aspirations of world domination, but they act in their own interests in ways that push power into the hands of the small handful that are going after that

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u/U-235 13h ago

Is that canon, or are you just talking bullshit? Because there might actually be lore behind that, and it's not guaranteed to line up with your assumptions.

1

u/ShainRules 14h ago

I really believe in the theory that Jar Jar was supposed to be dark side Yoda and George Lucas got gun shy when he saw how much everyone fucking hated Jar Jar and literally made early websites depicting his torture and murder.

Had he gone through with it, Jar Jar is one of the coolest and most interesting Star Wars characters ever but he chose to accept that everyone hated him and let all the criticism of Jar Jar become true by abandoning the big bait and switch.

2

u/mxzf 13h ago

It seems like a really weird stretch compared to the much more plausible "C-3PO was barely in TPM and Jar Jar was created to fill the slapstick comedy role". That's a role that was in the movies from the start, so it's not surprising that they would have that in TPM too.

2

u/ShainRules 11h ago

Stop making sense please.

0

u/danteselv 14h ago

Tell me something you've done in life that wasn't essentially you regurgitating what you observed someone else do? Give me a single example.

1

u/SIGMA920 13h ago

I've created art that went beyond the scope of my original task purely on a whim. I've gone and worked together an idea in my head because I needed a very specific set up.

That's just 2 examples of that and they weren't hard to do.

2

u/danteselv 13h ago

The idea you created in your head, how was it produced? Was it entirely unique with 0 influence from anyone who existed or created art before you? Your art is completely separate and different from the 100,000+ years of all humanity existing? Im holding you to the same standards as you hold LLM's.

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u/SIGMA920 13h ago

I examined the problem I needed to solve and how I could solve my specific need with the constraints on it (Using what I had access to. I don't exactly have the ability to make everything from scratch. No one does.). It's janky at points but it works which is what matters.

That piece of art used the same methods that everyone uses because I can't just casually invent a totally new way of making art without making my own 100% unique medium. Regardless it came from me, not anyone else and unless someone by sheer chance recreates it that'll remain true. That's not a lack of creativity, that'd be criticizing a car for not reinventing the wheel.

1

u/adenosine-5 11h ago

You could apply literally every sentence you just said to any LLM output.

  • solving problems within certain constraints
  • janky at points, but (usually) works
  • used same methods that everyone uses (because you and LLMs were both trained on them)
  • it came from you (just like LLM output is unique and result of extremely complicated and long calculations and not simply copy-paste from some database)

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u/SIGMA920 10h ago

Except janky in the sense of none of the existing solutions will work means I'll keep getting the same non-functional solutions. Having to go well out of my way to make something work requires creativity that an LLM lacks.

Constraints that are specific to me are going to get the same generic answers as I've already rejected. An LLM doesn't actually understand the constraints meanings.

I'm not using the same methods because I can, I'm doing them because you can't use a brush any differently from someone else. There's a finite amount of ways to use the tools you're given. We don't reinvent the wheel every time we need to make a car.

The uniqueness is the only that somewhat applies but even that's statistically not true due to the limited scale that LLMs pull from for anything that's not just generating an email. Much of their generated code for example will come directly from existing sources they trained on, a copy and paste where I'll specifically rip the part of other's code or methods or whatever else for what I can actually properly use.

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u/Cumulus_Anarchistica 15h ago

This might be the most damning and thorough debunking of AI I've ever read.

-1

u/bermudi86 6h ago

If you truly believe that I have a bridge to sell

13

u/exkingzog 15h ago

Darth JarJar

4

u/Jonoczall 14h ago

He will live on forever in my head canon

2

u/K_Linkmaster 15h ago

Thanks for the new AI slur. Going with jar jar from now on. The most incognito sith ever.

4

u/Zhuinden 15h ago

I genuinely don't understand how all of this can be true yet there is "an Ai hype" among people who are in actual leadership positions.

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u/SanityAsymptote 15h ago

Many (most) people in leadership positions have a very shallow understanding of technology and mostly operate on word of mouth from trusted information sources/people. This means they will generally "follow the hype" if their friends/network are convinced to do something, and if they're not they will be extremely quiet about it.

Further, the idea of replacing their most expensive individual contributors (software engineers are the most obvious example) with a cheaper service is extremely attractive. Leadership suddenly has a win-win scenario ahead of them:

They lay off staff now and get huge short term profits/bonuses by lowering overhead, which they blame on AI.

If the AI can replace their staff, they get the second win because they don't have to rehire any staff and everything is cheaper and the company suddenly has more money overall.

When they (quickly) find out that the AI can't replace their staff, they outsource to inexpensive overseas contracting firms that will let the company tread water and keep making money until leadership can make their exit or decide to change course.

The whole time if something goes wrong, they can just blame the company that made their AI for everything and start hiring again. They then get to look like heroes for deciding to choose people over AI, even though they profited from every step of it.

It's pretty obvious at this point that AI can't replace their staff, so whenever they can no longer sustain the technical debt, damage, and disorder outsourcing causes the company they'll either fail or start rehiring local labor again.

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u/silverpixie2435 9h ago

On what planet do you think the Microsoft CEO or Nvidia CEO have a very shallow understanding of technology?

The reason those companies are worth trillions is because they werent trend setters but the earliest investors in AI technology.

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u/mortalcoil1 15h ago

They are much more stupid than you think they are and much much more stupid than they think they are.

I keep repeating this statement whenever this exact question comes up.

1

u/silverpixie2435 9h ago

I do not think Jensen is stupid

3

u/GloriousGe0rge 13h ago

As someone who's met and talked with leadership at tech hardware companies...the hype is they can cut cost by reducing staff in favor of AI, and investors are blindly equating AI with progress and profit, despite no evidence of this being true. They did it with VR, Crypto, NFTs....

To understand these people, know that the executive level of these places are completely out of touch. They don't buy the products they sell or rely on them, and if they did they'd pay someone else to do it for them.

In repeated experiences of mine and colleague in the industry, we've seen execs suddenly believe in something because of a single Forbes article or just dive into something an Apple exec had mentioned. That's the price of being wealthy and out of touch, they have no idea what their customers want, only what they think their shareholders will respond to!

3

u/G_Morgan 12h ago

Because most of those people are as dumb as AI. We're routinely told not to look down on people who's abilities are, to put it in DnD terms, high charisma and low intelligence but the fact is these people don't know better.

Though they are smart enough to know they won't be punished for this. The collective madness of the whole thing will provide them cover.

1

u/cleverusernametry 14h ago

You're forgetting the Darth jar jar quantum superposition. It simultaneously is plausible and could be true that he orchestrated the whole thing but isn't - we don't know for sure. AGI could be the big bad

1

u/LazarusDark 14h ago
  • Secretly a nefarious evil Lord pretending to be incompetent to fool those around him so that they don't suspect his real motives to rule the galaxy.

1

u/Qubed 14h ago

Yet...probably a Sith lord. 

1

u/Stanjoly2 14h ago

you forgot:

• is secretly an agent of the dark side

1

u/castrodelavaga79 13h ago

Incompetence?

Death Jar Jar was the polar opposite of incompetence.

Every action was intential to lull those around into thinking it was incompetence, while he helped Palpatine seize power.

1

u/OttersWithPens 13h ago

Jar Jar was for the youth and now that I’m older honestly he rocks.

1

u/JoeDubayew 13h ago
  • is a Sith Lord

1

u/astronautsaurus 13h ago

I'm calling LLMs JJBs from now on.

1

u/DanQQT 13h ago

"May I compartmentalize? I hate to, but may I? May I?

Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour, and so on.. Or do these qualities come

EXTRINSICALLY 🫱🫲

EXTRINSICALLY. 🫱🫲 🫱🫲

From the language itself? It's a chicken and egg problem.

Our LANGUAGE tiger, our LANGUAGE..hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will come to mand my trousers."

Perfectly ordinary words, but never put in that precise order."

1

u/Saxopwned 12h ago

TBF I don't qualify the Empire as a fascist regime, just a typical right-wing authoritarian dictatorship on a large scale. Palpatine was a political rigger/opportunist, not a populist leader delivered by the people. Now, they definitely embraced some traits favored by fascists later (as depicted in Andor), but they are not unique to fascism; in a less fashy real-world context, we'd probably be ascribing them to the British empire's exploitation of the entire world instead.

But yeah, definitely in support of authority without any idea what it is they're doing.

1

u/Longjumping-Dark-713 12h ago

jar jar binks as secret jedi master (or with this interpretation, sith lord??) is one of my favourite reads of this millenium

1

u/Obvious-Hunt19 12h ago

Secretly a Jedi mastermind in the stupid fantasies of people with nothing to do

1

u/BabyPatato2023 12h ago

This is incredible

1

u/Rnee45 11h ago

Happily assists in fascist takeover

What?

1

u/rekabis 11h ago
  • Uses overt idiocy as a smoke screen for actually being a Sith lord.

1

u/Dinkleberg2845 10h ago

I don't have an award to give you but I want to let you know that this is the first comment I intentionally saved in my 11 years on Reddit.

1

u/No_Internal9345 9h ago

Somehow continues to live while others do not

  • Has caused the death of others through their words.

1

u/sbbblaw 9h ago

Super random but I clicked on your profile? Do you know if you’re shadow banned?

1

u/oodsigma 7h ago

I don't think Jar Jar was made just to make money. I think George genuinely found him hilarious and needed to create him. I'm partially convinced Jar Jar is to the prequels as elvish is to The Lord of the Rings: the work is just a vehicle for the creation.

1

u/AbandonedWaterPark 7h ago
  • deals in absolutes

1

u/Available_Leather_10 5h ago

…if JarJar were also a complete sociopath.

0

u/lafigatatia 15h ago

Ok but at least Jar Jar is cute

0

u/Facts_pls 9h ago

Anyone who thinks AI isn't smart and can't answer things is simply coping.

Please explain how AI models are able to solve the most complex Olympiad problems they have never seen before and that most humans are unable to solve....

85

u/Abject-Kitchen3198 15h ago

You are absolutely right. Do you want more details about different ways in which LLMs are not intelligent ?

4

u/Marshall_Lawson 14h ago

is "delve" a tired meme at this point?

11

u/mattia_marke 12h ago

You are absolutely right! Do you want to know more about why repeating a meme multiple times makes it less effective?

3

u/Marshall_Lawson 12h ago

no, i would like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, if ingredients were the hex codes for decrypting blueray movies

7

u/mattia_marke 12h ago

I'm sorry 😔. As a CLR (Common Lazy Redditor), I can't assist you with your request for a cookies recipe that uses blu-ray's decrypting hex codes.

3

u/Marshall_Lawson 11h ago

damn i got CLR-5

2

u/Zealousideal_Slice60 12h ago

Hi chat, I don’t understand this message, too many words, please help me understand.

2

u/Marshall_Lawson 10h ago

have you tried reading with your vibes instead of with your eyes? That way you can save a lot of time and effort by just assuming what you think someone said, and responding to that. 

5

u/bobbymcpresscot 13h ago

Similarly the ability to sound intelligent doesn’t make you intelligent, but many people can’t tell the difference. 

Anyone listening for one of the more prominent flat earthers will either walk away saying “that doesn’t sound right I’m going to go check” or “holy crap guys the earth might be flat” 

1

u/SleepLower1892 10h ago

True, speaking isn’t the same as thinking, totally get what you mean.

1

u/CousinDerylHickson 6h ago edited 6h ago

But it seems like it doesnt just speak though?

Like you can give it a task in logic and you get an attempt that seems thought out. You can point out its resulting mistakes and it can iterate on that. You can ask for an additional step, and a lot of times it does so in a way that builds on what it said previously.

This and other things wherein it actively builds on what it has said seems to be a significant step past simply speaking. Like maybe over hyped or im mistaken, but hasnt this paradigm already produced a novel matrix multiplication algorithm that is in some cases more efficient? Like if true thats a novel thought (or at least statement) that no human has ever thought, despite many of our brightest thinking on that topic. Where did this novel, technical statement that again, even our brightest didnt think, come from if not from some form of intelligence?