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abalashov

4,634 karmajoined 18 лет назад
VoIP, SIP & Kamailio guy. Principal of Evariste Systems and developer of CSRP:

http://www.evaristesys.com/ http://www.csrpswitch.com/

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abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
One hardly needs to soar to the exalted heights of "mysticism" or any sort of "ineffable qualities" to come into contact with the limitations of LLMs.

1) Models do not perform the functional equivalent of reasoning at all. When we reason, we don't simply babble out textual derivations of prior examples of "reasoning" to which we have been exposed, arrive at a conclusion, then occasionally state an altogether different conclusion while pointing at the largely irrelevant reasoning to substantiate it.

2) Models have real-world, not-at-all-mystical functional constraints that are directly relevant to the production of everyday economic work in which one attempts to involve them. Their inability to extrapolate or maintain clear mental models leads to staggering, head-scratching mistakes that even a very feeble and developmentally awry human intelligence would not make.

A basic, if well-worn example that was widely discussed in the last year or two:

https://medium.com/@JerryCuomo/why-ai-gets-the-strawberry-qu...

However, this is emblematic of a much larger idea: the LLM doesn't have any idea what a letter is or what you're asking it to do. This isn't a question of "ineffable qualia"; when it doesn't know what something is at any essential level, it can't competently solve problems related to it. One bumps up against this in everyday programming and all the time.

Also, what is "mystical" about my demand for the kind of scientific progress--no, forget that, any scientific progress--that a functional superhuman intelligence would yield? I am not a "mystic", either; I want functional results, show me the functionality.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
Although I agree with you, in fairness, there are some lively controversies in the world of cognitive science and philosophy of mind about whether this meaningfully differs from human thinking at sufficient scale.

The general idea is that the building blocks of "coherent models" and "processes" within the churning of the human intellect are also, in so many words, prior art and existing concepts, and so, while the human mind is not a text model, a sufficiently large and sensorily multimodal neural net would not be too different. Neural nets are, after all, inspired by what we understand of human cognition -- they'd say.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
This is an astute observation. I think it reflects a larger and longer-running strain in the relationship between technocracy and the humanities, though, of which this latest iteration is just even more choleric and rote. The plumbers of capitalism always seem to have had deep contempt for the arts and the humanities, not in the least because they didn't do too well at them in school or didn't understand how philosophy relates to making money, or something.

This has led to some rather fantastical conclusions on both sides, however. On one side, there's an almost sadistic "revenge of the nerds" glee at the notion that these airy-fairy, frou-frou, and "feminised" liberal arts majors will finally crumble before the stochastic parrot machine god, and on the other side, a no less comical notion that after "AI" ushers in utopia, then high-brow artistic and literary pursuits will be all that remains for us to do.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
Fair enough, but I'm not sure this is how the general population uses LLM chatbots, nor how the highly qualified always use LLMs.

On the contrary, I believe most people use them precisely to find out more about topics of which they know vanishingly little, much as they'd have used Google before LLMs.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
This is my position, as well, and I have switched exclusively to Chinese models in support of this view (and cost and because they're pretty awesome).
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
It's quite trivial to show that an LLM doesn't have underlying intent, and that it can only emit direct textual convolutions of its training and not combine tokens in truly novel ways. This is the very thesis of the world-model folks, e.g. LeCun et al, that LLMs are a general intelligence dead-end because they lack any inner concept of the world around them, and do not reason from that.

Furthermore, LLMs clearly do not "reason", despite the marketing around this term; their "chains of thought" are the nothing more than the result of having been trained on explicitly verbalised multi-step processes. There are many cases where the putative result arrived at in the <think>chain of thought</think> does not match the result emitted.

Whether they are "better" at software development than I am greatly depends on whether one is asking them to retrace worn technology paths that are well-represented in their training--in effect, to copy prior art--or to do something in quite obscure technology, or something quite novel altogether. (However, I will happily concede that most everyday business programming involves neither.)

Still, if LLMs were actually intelligent, let alone superhuman in the sense you suggest, then we would expect major scientific breakthroughs to be raining from the sky. If, say, an Einstein, could transform physics with only the knowledge gleaned from a human's feeble capacity to retain the literature of the time, I'd expect LLMs, who retain orders of magnitude more information with far greater fidelity and precision, to have offered at least a small slither of evidence of their superhuman capabilities.

I would also expect the objective progress and capabilities of this galaxy brain to be accelerating, not substantially slowing down as it has. GPT-2 to GPT-3 was truly a quantum leap, GPT-3 to GPT-4 was a substantial jump, GPT-4 to GPT-5 was meh, 5+ is basically unimportant, and so it goes for the other models. There are, of course, holes plugged and benchmarks where these evolutions have been, in various niche ways, consequential, but in the plainspoken meaning of model capability, the low-hanging fruit of pretraining was clearly exhausted quite some time ago. The carnival has been running on "agentic" / MCP / RAG / tool-use fumes since. This is moderately impressive and adds quite a bit of runway, but intelligence it is not.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
I do think it's easy, in this technology discussion bubble in which we dwell, to overestimate the centrality of LLMs to the arc of developments in our time.

They'll be important, but I don't think they'll be _that_ important, because the rest of society and the economy don't move at the speed of SV. Instead, they'll be overtaken by other, more traditional categories of events, ruptures and dislocations.

Moreover, folks will eventually realise that while they are very impressive derivative databases of knowledge, they're not at all "AI" -- well, not the "I" part, anyway -- as the concept is traditionally understood. There's not any "I". It emits convolutions of its training, and it does so very impressively, and that can even be harnessed by agents to connect them to levers, servos and richer information sources. It's nifty. But it's just not intelligence. It's more of a kind of queryable database than a robot.

Once that realisation diffuses more widely, I think it'll turn out to be a more prosaic and underwhelming development than is presently hypothesised, either here or by the press. It doesn't mean many business and managerial class folks won't try to squeeze everything they can out of so-called AI, but the idea that this can effectuate truly widespread labour displacement will probably quiet down considerably. (The valuations that depend on this assumption may collapse more abruptly and less gracefully.)

The challenge is staying solvent until then. :-)
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
Fine, but my point was that releasing open source software implies contributing to that, virtually by definition, and then to be met with a déluge of slop PRs and GH issues. Who can blame a developer for saying, "screw that?"
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
I don't think we're going to agree about many things, but we definitely agree on that!
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
Well, lots of ways. One is some degree of model collapse, as the slop-enshittified Internet itself is ingested as training data--despite the AI companies' best efforts to prevent this, they won't be altogether successful.

But the more consequential one may be that few are motivated to contribute more training data to make Dario or Sam richer. This is already playing out in open source. People write open-source so humans can use it, in that human way that humans do, not to make Dario richer because his models will emit statistically convoluted copies of that open-source. What is my incentive to open-source something that I could commercialise today, compared to what it was before the LLM age?

(Many will say there's not much point in commercialising it, either, but to the extent that software still has commercial value, the appeal of the alternative path has greatly diminished.)
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
I suppose valid grounds for both perceptions can coexist.

Opposition to AI here is more than understandable; it takes much of the joy out of programming as a craft, while leaving one with so much much more of what is hateable about it as a day-job.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
Thank you in turn, I have circulated your piece to thoughtful friends.

My immediate, from-the-hip thought is that we are slowly lumbering toward the idea that LLMs ("AI") should be a public utility. It may take us quite a while to get there yet, as an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power is arrayed precisely against this outcome, but I think that will be the eventual effect, in that, "in the long run, we're all dead" kind of way.
abalashov
·5 дней назад·discuss
It was a brilliant article, and it succinctly captured the offenses to ethics and humanism posed by LLMs.

I'm not sure it'll get a lot of reception in the technocracy here on HN, whether of the AI booster or AI nihilist sort. However, I think it's a very comprehensive digestion of the questions that will swirl around the idea of LLMs as a public good in the near to medium future.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
My love life has seen hockey stick growth since I spawned subagents to hang out with women for me.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here:

https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

(Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.)

Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes.

They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
It is helpful in such cases to look up, touch grass, and realise that "do it for you" is doing a lot of work there. The technology still can only emit a convolution of its training, and this is an ontological, conceptual limit on the technology, not something that the next model will just overcome. It's not "intelligence" -- you still have to know things.

It's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
I know, right? Have the AI go to the gym and work out for you.
abalashov
·7 дней назад·discuss
Приятно слышать, а то иногда народ говорит, что это мертвый язык...