I don't think so - they could get a lot better, but it's going to take a lot of human brainpower to get there. They are barely adequate now, but their weaknesses are sold as intrinsic to the nature of the software in a way that mere civilians are too dumb to understand.
But imagine a world in which you could ask AI to write software to accomplish a particular task, and it understood completely what you meant, made tasteful choices, interviewed you as it went along to clarify things, and generated beautifully commented (maybe even Knuth-style literate) code that wasn't dogshit. Doesn't seem like an impossibility. What is annoying is that we're pretending like we have anything like that now.
Instead, there's this sort of science fiction pitch where we pretend like the LLM is just too damn logical to understand your sloppy human language. It's not logical, it's built on (human-generated) slop and generates slop. It's simply failing. We've come up with better ways to orient it towards big picture thinking and filling in outlines, but we don't know how to train it on big pictures.
Not that this would stop open models/harnesses from following (or even leading) frontier labs and destroying their insane valuations, but I don't think there's any evidence that a plateau has been reached. What we have is not great, and while a wall may have been hit on current approaches, the money, compute, and simply current progress in ideas has us in an environment where everything could change over the course of a crazy day. A single blog entry.
I do think that the frontier labs seem to have reached at least a temporary plateau. But if they figured out how to move past it and this new method didn't require a lot more compute, they'd still be screwed. Their only out is to pass the bag to the public, but Firmus, CharacterAI, CoreWeave...
> generated beautifully commented (maybe even Knuth-style literate) code that wasn't dogshit. Doesn't seem like an impossibility.
It seems closer to impossible than possible with the technology we have. Maybe something that isn't an LLM will come around that can do it, but even if that something else was capable of delivering perfect, ordered, maintainable, code without bugs and hallucinations it would have to be practically magical to understand completely what people mean when they talk about what they want because people are incapable of articulating what they want in a way that even other humans can understand.
For anything non-trivial, a technology capable of getting that information out of person without countless meetings would have managed to accomplish something far beyond what entire teams of humans are able to do today.
> It's not logical, it's built on (human-generated) slop and generates slop.
This is why if we haven't hit a plateau yet we very quickly will. All the good human generated slop has already been consumed and is being drowned out by vast amounts of the lossy, error filled, and highly concentrated slop AI produces from the human slop it was trained on.
Do you really think an LLM that spews out content based on statistical relationships is going to improve when it's been primarily trained on the slop of previous generations of LLMs? Hallucinations and errors will carry forward and spread like cancer. All the intelligence and creativity LLMs borrowed from human output will homogenize as the LLMs distill and then reiterate, effectively making bullet points out of bullet points, until their mimicry of intelligence becomes unintelligible.
I feel like BYOD was when the disease accelerated. It was the coup excuse for everybody and their mother to own a piece of your personal phone. Bank apps not working with rooted phones is pretty much BYOD 2.0.
The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
> But Cynthia Dunlop's survey on tech reader preferences has shown that people overwhelming dislike AI-written articles, preferring even "bad" human writing to "good" AI writing.
I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.
It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.
People absolutely know what they experienced, they’re just guessing about what went wrong and how to fix it. “I hate AI” doesn’t necessarily mean “I can only please this person by not using AI”, but it sure does mean there’s something about your AI this person hates. “The economy’s doing poorly” doesn’t tell you about Nvidia’s stock price, but it does tell you about this person’s experiences and information exposure.
yep, there's a massive say-do gap in play - very similar to the way people say they prefer no makeup but behavioral studies reveal a preference for light/tastefully-applied makeup
Direct result of the weakening of antitrust from a 2007 case legalizing vertical price-fixing, justified by the dumb fake rationale that Wikipedia paraphrases as:
> manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.
It has nothing to do with technology, just oligarchy and corruption. Nothing "capitalists" hate more than competition.
edit: as an aside, why are almost none of the top level comments, and absolutely none of the 5 most upvoted comments, about Amazon pricing policies? They're all about how people like to (or don't like to) shop at Amazon. Who cares?
> In theory, someone being released from prison has paid for his crime and reformed his behavior
There's no theory that says this.
> he doesn't deserve further extrajudicial punishment
1) You're explaining your own personal belief here and not referring to anything.
2) It is not extrajudicial punishment to not hire a child molester to work with children any more than it is extrajudicial punishment to not hire a bank robber to work at a bank.
Exactly. I'm all for giving people who have been in prison employment, but maybe not in the exact way that they went to prison for in the first place. He could have worked at a bagel shop for all I care.
> Please don't try to convince people to accept the current abuses of the system as inevitable or "both sides" when they clearly aren't.
Please stop only waking up under a Republican administration, or even worse just under the administration of a wrestling valet game show host.
> clearly aren't.
"Oh, please" and "it's just so obvious." If it's so clear, you should have less trouble explaining it than other things. And that doesn't mean explaining the bad things that your enemies do in power, but explaining how your friends weren't doing those things and actively ending them when they were in power.
Clinton did the massive deregulation that defined this century. Obama didn't prosecute anyone for 2008 financial crimes*, let Citigroup pick his cabinet, bailed out the banks, and flooded the stock market with free cash. Biden is literally the Delaware credit card prevent student loans from being discharged in bankruptcy guy, he had great people in Kanter, Khan and Chopra and undermined and ignored them consistently while breaking a railroad strike.
All absolute dirtbags who did what Republicans could have never gotten away with, because partisans who pretend to care fall asleep when Democrats are in power. A lot of consulting firms and nonprofits get flooded with state cash when Democrats are in power, and don't when Republicans are in power (and vice versa.) Patronage is more powerful than ethics when it comes to the middle class.
[*] Or for a worldwide torture network, or the people who admitted destroying evidence of the worldwide torture network. Or for the intentional lies that began two Middle East wars.
> Or for a worldwide torture network, or the people who admitted destroying evidence of the worldwide torture network. Or for the intentional lies that began two Middle East wars.
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