This is what I've been saying. We're not so much learning that LLMs are intelligent, we're learning that a lot of what we think of as intelligence is actually just pattern matching.
But the real intelligence exists and it is beyond all those trinkets. Right? Yeah, this is a common cope.
There's no solid evidence that the brain uses quantum computations. And that's the only definite thing (besides 'magic') that can solidly place the brain out of reach for now.
Evolution has scaled the brain to hundreds of trillions of synapses (parameters) and hundreds of billions of neurons (processing nodes). Current models have around 1/1000 of that number of parameters. The top data centers operate at around 1 exaflop (on par with the brain). Inference uses significantly less than that.
I’ll wait until the effective number of parameters in ML models is comparable to that of the brain. Then it will be clear whether the brain has something up its sleeve.
Everything was obviously DOA after it dies. I also thought it wouldn't last but it wouldn't be the first or last tech company initiative that lived on long after people thought it would die. Weird things happen. "Obviously" isn't a good filter.
The comment I read about this that I liked was that they want to push the idea of starting with an Issue and a discussion before going straight to a PR. That way you can build reputation by contributing to a discussion first. Maybe you could "earn" a temporary Vouch like this that lets you start submitting. Still open to attack but the attack is at least more difficult.
Agreed. The obvious solution is to lower the barrier of entry for demonstrating good intent, but also lowering the ceiling of effort required to analyze that demonstration for good intent.
Mandating participation in discussion prior to creating any PR sounds like a perfectly reasonable requirement.
That's the big difference for me. I use Github Copilot because I want to see the output and work with it. For people who are fine just shooting a prompt out and getting code back, I'm sure Claude Code is better.
If your neighbor kept baking and giving you cookies, to the point where you were wrapping and reselling them at the market, don't you think you should do something for them in return?
Not if they gave me a legal document explicitly stating I didn’t need to give them anything…and I could get an infinite amount of the cookies with no extra work or money on their part…
And I would probably suggest to them that if they were interested in profiting from their cookies they should stop giving them away for free and make them commercial instead. They might then tell me they don’t want to spend the effort and money to commercialize their cookies, or maybe they prefer it as a hobby with no obligations to customers, or maybe they tell me they have a philosophical belief that they should give their their cookies away for free for anyone to do as they please with them, including commercializing them as long as they aren’t legally responsible for anything done with the cookies which is why they handed me that legal contract explicitly stating that when they gave them to me in the first place.
What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really worked.
Wow, that was awesome. They had to crank up the FPS of the high-speed camera into the millions of FPS to see that brightness control over every individual LED was done by flashing it multiple times per scanline. Very cool.
There's a similar feeling story in a later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book* where it's a history of England in that universe. The part that really stuck with me was the description of the government from 1984 as just another strange period in history. Eventually, Big Brother just falls and the next government takes over. Compared with how the system in 1984 feels hopeless and eternal it gives me a strange kind of hope.
In blacksmithing there's the concept of an "anvil shaped object". That is, something that looks like an anvil but is hollow or made of ceramic or something. It might stand up to tapping on for making jewelry or something but should never be worked like a real anvil for fear of hurting someone or wrecking the thing you're working on when it breaks.
I feel like a lot of the AI articles and experiments like this one are producing "app shaped objects" that look okay for making content (and indeed are fine for making earrings) but fall apart when pounded on by the real world.
Plus we can suspect a tremendous amount of astroturfing on this topic. When you’re spending billions on the tech, a few millions (if it even is that much) for “creative marketing” are really nothing.
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