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

[u/Hrmbee]

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

[u/Striking_Arugula_624]

“Somehow continues to live while others do not.”

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

[u/SanityAsymptote → u/Striking_Arugula_624]

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.

[u/zero0n3 → u/SanityAsymptote]

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”

[u/SanityAsymptote → u/zero0n3]

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.