lobsters score: 1 · tags: vibecoding
If you’ve paid attention to the HuggingFace hacking scandal and to what’s going on in mathematics, we’re well past the “stochastic parrot”, and have entered a world in which a sufficient amount of raw capital and verifiable constraints can solve complex problems.
Unconvincing. An unsupervised swarm of stochastic parrots told to emulate hacking and piped directly to shell managed to eventually exploit something. Like, yes, it can do harm, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. The parrot may well be able to do your job, because you don’t really need to think to implement yet another CRUD service. You may take psychic damage from being forced realize that your job was one of the bullshit ones, but it would’ve still been one even without the parrot.
To put it in maximally edgy terms, there is a moral imperative to firebomb something, where datacenter ∈ something, but not for the specific purpose of slowing AI.
score 3 · canonical
Like, yes, it can do harm, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.
Y’know, I strongly believe that even if you end up being right (which I think is questionable at this point), you should consider that existing cutting edge AI systems are (for many different types of functions) indistinguishable from “being intelligent” by basically all objective metrics you may be able to come up with.
That’s a real question: Can you give me a test for “intelligence” which (at least some) humans pass, while LLMs fail it?
score 1 · canonical
I won’t give you a test, but consider this: language models still struggle at spatial reasoning and other embodied intelligence tasks. It really is like the Chinese room I think, or a variation of it: you can know everything there is to know about the Eiffel Tower without actually having experienced it in person. Also, I’m still incredibly sceptical of benchmarks in general because I seriously don’t believe you can meaningfully benchmark a system that has ingested probably several copies of the entire Internet, and has enough parameters to store a good chunk of it verbatim.
I generally agree with this piece from The Atlantic. A language model is fundamentally different to anything that has remotely existed ever in biology. If you want to accept these things as intelligent, or sentient, or whichever you prefer, you would need to provide some serious insight into the nature of its intelligence.
score 1 · canonical
While I also generally agree with that Atlantic piece, LLMs are getting better and better at spatial reasoning:
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GPT-6 “driving” a car (albeit obviously not in realtime/at regular speeds)
I think it’ll get more and more difficult to find tasks that can’t ever be achieved by any model – the cat is out of the bag, so to speak – and thus by extension, difficult to define intelligence?
score 2 · canonical