7 ms·

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we)

• aaron695 4mo ago
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• bayindirh 4mo ago
  Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently. We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
  • limflick 4mo ago
    Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
    • holtkam2 4mo ago
      The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
      • ElevenLathe 4mo ago
        It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.
        • adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
          I think you’re right but I wanted to note that we are discovering that other animals also have language.
          • ElevenLathe 4mo ago
            Yes, this to me is also a good sign for the "it's language that's smart, not us" argument. It's an emergent trait that has evolved several times, like flight or carcinization. There's something about language that attracts evolution toward it. One would expect such a trait to have a big survival value (disclaimer: IANA biologist, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, or linguist).
        • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
          At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities. A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
          • ElevenLathe 4mo ago
            I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard. Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on. It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it. For the religious angle, look no further than John 1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
    • vanilla_nut 4mo ago
      Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master. Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25. All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively? Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly. Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
      • mancerayder 4mo ago
        One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone. It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems. But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with. That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
• remix2000 4mo ago
  I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.
  • gruez 4mo ago
    >I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, ... Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
    • sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
      A thing that people have chosen to call AI is here today.
      • gruez 4mo ago
        That just continues a tradition of moving the goalposts for "AI" to just beyond what's currently possible.
        • sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
          If you want to lean into the lie, you do you. I will not.
        • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
          Kind of, but I wouldn't exactly put it like that since AI has never meant anything more than automated intelligence/decision making of some sort. The bar isn't moving, just this almost meaningless label is just forever getting slapped on the latest shiny new thing. You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
        • 4mo ago
• websap 4mo ago
  Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil. Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
  • manmal 4mo ago
    Blacksmiths is not the best analogy here.
    • jcgrillo 4mo ago
      Why not? Blacksmithing and coding have a hell of a lot in common. In both disciplines toolmaking is extremely important. Often you have to make custom tools to accomplish a design--e.g. a twisting wrench or a form tool. Sometimes you have to make tools that get used once and thrown away, like a jig temporarily welded to a piece to hold it in place while you build its sibling assembly. Sound familiar? I do this kind of thing all the time in code. Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest. Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
  • throwatdem12311 4mo ago
    I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt. “You’re right - I overstepped” Is the new “You’re absolutely right”. I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• whack 4mo ago
  > They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore. Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them. If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
  • croon 4mo ago
    "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
    • F3nd0 4mo ago
      > A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!
      • anthk 4mo ago
        A Lisp programmer it's very aware of the value of nil or ().
        • gmfawcett 4mo ago
          Look up "perlis epigrams lisp" for the context here. :)
  • exitb 4mo ago
    Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
• stringfood 4mo ago
  Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak
• JTbane 4mo ago
  No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth. My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
  • disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
    > My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete. That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though. > No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth. I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
  • ACCount37 4mo ago
    Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems. AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
    • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      That simply isn't true. LLMs are completely incapable of operating without supervision, same as they were 3 years ago.
      • ACCount37 4mo ago
        The scope and scale of the tasks LLMs can be trusted to do without supervision has increased massively in the meanwhile. Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
• wnevets 4mo ago
  >the students needed to hear this. I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
• port11 4mo ago
  We’ve also done true intelligence a disservice by using AI to name the current implementation of LLMs. It’s stretching ‘intelligence’ quite a bit. They can be super useful, but we’ve downplayed how phenomenal the human brain is. I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
• 0xpgm 4mo ago
  > They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore. Are we already questioning the value of a human brain because of Large Language Models? Glorified search over a vector space? This is actual psychosis