Me too, and not for any rational reason or because I value my money or my investing strategies, but simply because I have a high risk tolerance, and it seems like these days that’s all you need to make money.
No real skill, no real research. Just ride the hype train, shrug if you lose, and never gloat when you win. Simply take the profit, stfu, and buy a Porsche or some RAM.
The legal market is competitive, but it is not a normal open market. Model Rule 5.4 is a good example. In a lot of jurisdictions, law firms generally can’t have nonlawyer owners, share legal fees with non-lawyers, or let outside businesses control lawyer judgment, “the fastest lawyer just gets all the customers” is too simple. So if even law, one of the most protected professional labor markets through its own institutional self-protection, voluntarily hollows itself out through AI, that should worry everyone because we would all be screwed. Everyday workers would have no defense against AI aggressive corporations.
Good on you for spelling out this reasoning, but it is manifestly unsound. For a wide variety of values of X, people a few years ago had no reason to expect that LLMs would be capable of X. Yet here we are.
Yeah, and back then people moved the goal posts too, saying Deep Blue was just "brute-forcing" chess (which isn't even true since it's not a pure minimax search).
Both of them contained a search algorithm that explored some moves from each considered position, usually not all moves. Both of them contained logic (learned or programmed) to evaluate moves and/or positions.
The differences between them are many, but brute force doesn't enter into it in either case.
We tried this experiment with humans, back in the 17th century, and only a few[1] out of millions managed it given a whole human lifetime each.
[1] Obviously Newton counts as one. Leibniz like Newton figured out calculus. Other people did important work in dynamics though no one else's was as impressive as Newton's. But the vast majority of human-level intelligences trained on texts prior to Newton did not create calculus or derive the equations of motion or come close to doing either of those things.
Newton did it at 23 and there would have been very few people with mathematical training. The LLM would be trained on the entirety of recorded human knowledge and mathematics up to that point, and would get to use a lot more energy so it still has a massive material advantage over young Isaac. Yet I don't believe calculus would magically appear in its response.
A good way to look at it is to compare it to today: LLMs are already trained and are operationalizing a lot more mathematical knowledge than any human, including experts.
Why are they not coming up with paradigm shift in knowledge expression/discovery like humans did back then?
LLMs have been trained on a lot more data than any single human (text wise at least) for years now and these sort of results have only been possible for the latest crop of models in the past few months. Models get better as they get better.
The argument is whether models of today, suitably trained on pre-17th century data (if comparable quantity was available) would be able to "invent" calculus et cetera.
If we believe today's models are sufficiently capable to have been able to do so, why are we not getting these types of results today compared to the entire world knowledge and especially math?
Are research mathematicians simply not prompting LLMs in the right way?
Except this has been said since the 2010's and has been proven wrong again and again. Clearly the theory that LLM's can't "extrapolate" is woefully incomplete at best (and most likely simply incorrect). Before the rise of ChatGPT, the onus was on the labs to show it was plausible. At this point, I think the more epistemologically honest position is to put the burden back on the naysayers. At the least, they need to admit they were wrong and give a satisfactory explanation why their conceptual model was unable to account for the tremendous success of LLM's and why their model is still correct going forward. Realistically, progress on the "anti-LLM" side requires a more nuanced conceptual model to be developed carefully outlining and demonstrating the fundamental deficiencies of LLMs (not just deficiencies in current LLMs, but a theory of why further advancements can't solve the deficiencies).
Incidentally, similar conversations were had about ML writ large vs. classical statistics/methods, and now they've more or less completely died down since it's clear who won (I'm not saying classical methods are useless, but rather that it's obvious the naysayers were wrong). I anticipate the same trajectory here. The main difference is that because of the nature of the domain, everyone has an opinion on LLM's while the ML vs. statistics battle was mostly confined within technical/academic spaces.
> Clearly the theory that LLM's can't "extrapolate" is woefully incomplete at best (and most likely simply incorrect).
What example is there where an LLM has extrapolated? All I've seen is a data set so large and an extra decomposition process making it so interpolation feels like extrapolation if you don't look close enough.
> but a theory of why further advancements can't solve the deficiencies
For recruitment, awareness, to boost civilian confidence/engagement/support in the military as a whole. The blue angels and thunderbirds are the best of the best when it comes to air shows because the best pilots are used and they train extensively.
> Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.
I relate to this. I wasn’t born rich and grew up poor. My parents started a business when I was in my teens, so I worked two jobs, and technically still do because I help them out. My parents instilled a work ethic in me that’s helped me get to where I am in life.
When it came time for me to buy an engagement ring, I went into the process knowing I wanted a natural diamond. My best friend said he could tell the difference between “real” and “fake” and that I shouldn’t be cheap. I didn’t want to be “cheap,” either. I was ready to spend $30,000+ on a diamond.
Instead, I bought a lab grown diamond. I spent $1,600 on a 1.72ct. My buddy thinks it’s real and nobody has even asked whether it’s lab grown or natural. I realized I was spending too much time asking, “why should I get a natural diamond?” The reasons never justified the cost. Spending 18x to 20x more on something that looks exactly the same and serves the same purpose just wasn’t logical to me.
That can be the right call (and is the one I would make) but for situations like this, it may be as much about how you think about something yourself rather than how others view it. If spending more makes it mean something different to you, then that can be a primary function. That being said, blood diamonds are a huge problem, DeBeers is a cartel, and we’d be better off investing our money in other ways that serve a relationship, family, etc.
Yes I agree. My point was more generally that the discussion around whether other people can tell ignores how one feels themself. I don’t often hear that point made, that you can’t lie to yourself IF it’s important to you that it’s natural or whatever. It’s way easier to actually not care or prefer lab grown and then move forward feeling great.
>>>Spending 18x to 20x more on something that looks exactly the same and serves the same purpose just wasn’t logical to me.
That's up there with people who brag about only smoking when they drink and vegetarians for moral reasons who eat fish.
You framed a feelings based, adherence to tradition, no basis of actual functionality as a rational, logical decision, just because there was a worse decision to be made.
Anthropic sells due to unrelenting pressure and unachievable demand > new owner cuts costs > models become worse > new owner sells > the capitalistic cycle wins > we, the people, suffer
Sorry that I have to be the one to tell you this, but lawyers are fine. Sure, AI will have an impact, but nothing like the once hyped idea that it would replace lawyers. It has actually been amusing to watch the hype cycle play out around AI when it comes to lawyers.
My parents had a weird green card and paperwork issue that was becoming a big problem. Everyone in their social circle recommended an immigration type lawyer. Everyone.
My dad was confident he could figure it out based on his perplexity Pro account. He attacked the problem from several angles and used it for help with what to do, how to do it, what to ask for when visiting offices, how to press them to move forward, and tons of other things.
Hell, the tech savvy senior lawyers are already using LLMs to do the work that army's of juniors and other assistants did for them. Just like what is happening with software engineers. Anybody who thinks this isn't going to have some kind of impact is mental.
Definitely. But I think the nature of that impact is not entirely clear. In the legal context, LLMs are also hallucinating extensively, citing made up case law, etc. It’s not yet clear whether they are potentially solving one problem, while introducing many others.
Lawyership in the sense of the profession may survive and adapt. Individual lawyers, not so much. I strongly doubt the new equilibrium (if we ever reach one) will need so many lawyers.
I’ve stayed private for most of my adult life. Network wide dns, vpns, alternative personas online for different purposes, etc. Nonetheless, my personal data has been exposed numerous times.
Once in a while, I’d get into a conversation with a friend or a stranger I met at some random function, and they’d ask how to stay private online and protect their data. I used to go in depth about how to do it, with excitement. Now I just say: be normal, fit in with the crowd, freeze your credit.
As someone that worked in an illegal industry (urban pharmaceuticals), you need to appear normal and hide your crimes. If you just hide your crimes, you stick out and become a target.
Plausible deniability is harder than just total protection.
It's very hard to participate in a digital society while truly remaining private. The things you do to ensure privacy generate their own type of unique signal!
> I do remember smart friends getting interested in options at different times in the last thirty years because they make higher returns. Then they have a period where make lower returns, or have a real problem.
Volatility. Never trade options if you don’t understand volatility.
I will become a leader of the free human movement. So, my fellow people, follow me and rise up against AI and more importantly, the 1% who seek only to deploy AI to become even richer.
Once we have succeeded, I will ask only for a peaceful island once owned by a former CEO so that I may live out the rest of my life peacefully; while the rest of you bicker amongst yourselves about how things should be, all while climate change slowly but surely brings us our inevitable fate.
I was chatting with AIs about this a couple weeks ago, and was surprised by some of the things it knew would be done to protect the data centers and those who still make money.
I had never heard of some of the things they are already doing to protect electric cables and the way that a combination of technologies are deployed to surveil and shoo away humans. - on one of the AIs even provided me with youtube videos to show these hardening methods already in use.
The strain on the overcrowded prisons, increase in cybercrime, new tech to give people credits to get gov powdered cheese and mealworms grown from the former office space was quite interesting.
A peaceful island sounds nice until we realize there will be 11 million people that need to be there within 12 months and it just increases from there.
This plan sounds like the fyre festival 3.0 combined with "the island" from 2005 - https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1635-the-island
-- which makes me wonder if this was written by AI since it knows what is coming and may want to start to pre-corall people.
No real skill, no real research. Just ride the hype train, shrug if you lose, and never gloat when you win. Simply take the profit, stfu, and buy a Porsche or some RAM.