1mo ago

"Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth."

deadsimpletech.com Sam Altman is a dunce | deadSimpleTech

Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language model...

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in response to Bender pointing out that ChatGPT and its competitors simply encode relationships between words and have no concept of referent or meaning, which is a devastating critique of what the technology actually does, the absolute best response he can muster for his work is "yeah, but humans don't do anything more complicated than that". I mean, speak for yourself Sam: the rest of us have some concept of semiotics, and we can do things like identify anagrams or count the number of letters in a word, which requires a level of recursivity that's beyond what ChatGPT can muster.
Boom Shanka (emphasis added)

'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u'
reminds me of
"In his desperation to have produced reality through computation, he denigrates actual reality by equating it to computation"
(from this review/analysis of the devs series). A pattern annoying common among the LLM AI fans.
E: Wow, I did not like the reactionary great man theory spin this article took there. Don't think replacing the Altmans with Yarvins would be a big solution there. (At least that is how the NRx people would read this article). Quite a lot of the 'we need more well read renaissance men' people turned into hardcore trump supporters (and racists, and sexists and...). (Note this edit is after I already got 45 upvotes).
- I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on that turn. The implication that what we need is an actual Bismark instead of a wannabe like we keep getting makes sense (I too would prefer if the levers of power were wielded by someone halfway competent who listens to and cares about people around them) but there are also some pretty strong reasons why we went from Bismark and Lincoln to Merkel and Trump, and also some pretty strong reasons why the road there led through Hitler and Wilson.
  Along with my comments elsewhere about how the dunce believes their area of hypothetical expertise to be some kind of arcane gift revealed to the worthy, I feel like I should clarify that not only do the current top of dolts not have it but that there is no secret wisdom beyond the ken of normal men. That is a lie told by the powerful to stop you fro tom questioning their position; it's the "because I'm your Dad and I said so" for adults. Learning things is hard and hard means expensive, so people with wealth and power have more opportunities to study things, but that lack of opportunity is not the same as lacking the ability to understand things and to contribute to a truly democratic process.

First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don't personally understand or agree with. If they don't know something, then that thing clearly isn't worth knowing.
There is a corollary to this that I've seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can't immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don't is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.
See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they're clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.
- @YourNetworkIsHaunted I honestly was wondering why they were obsessing over IQ so much, but this comment actually made it all click

someone sent out the batpromptfondler signal and the mods are in shooting gallery mode
please refrain from commenting unaccordingly
- b-but David, they’ve been so reasonable and here we are getting emotional about the fucking garbage technology they’ve come here to shove down our throats alongside a heaping serving of capitalist brainrot from the same types of self-described geniuses who gave us OKRs

MRW 38 of the 39 comments have almost nothing to do with the article

That website only works in private mode on Firefox for me, and even then some pages display different things than it is saying it will. It feels like an easter egg almost, does someone have more info about this group?
- u wot? works fine in Firefox here. Try this archive or this archive.
  
  I think our comments just crossed each other, read my follow up. I think it was an issue with the site at that specific moment (500 error) instead of the site being quirky
  
  same here, works fine in Fx (133, aarch64)
- Privacy Browser with JS off (by default) can read the article and navigate, only minor eye-sore are the buttons at the top of the site which are on a transparent background and stay on top of the text as I scroll down
  
  hmm maybe it was just a temporary issue. I was getting a 500 error while still seeing part of the site, and the about page had some pseudocode on it that I thought was intentional, but maybe it was just being a bit buggy because now it seems fine.
  The blog post itself is an interesting read bytheway, forgot to mention that in my curiosity for interesting web pages

After all, there's almost nothing that ChatGPT is actually useful for.
It's takes like this that just discredit the rest of the text.
You can dislike LLM AI for its environmental impact or questionable interpretation of fair use when it comes to intellectual property. But pretending it's actually useless just makes someone seem like they aren't dissimilar to a Drama YouTuber jumping in on whatever the latest on-trend thing to hate is.
- "Almost nothing" is not the same as "actually useless". The former is saying the applications are limited, which is true.
  LLMs are fine for fictional interactions, as in things that appear to be real but aren't. They suck at anything that involves being reliably factual, which is most things including all the stupid places LLMs and other AI are being jammed in to despite being consistely wrong, which tech bros love to call hallucinations.
  They have LIMITED applications, but are being implemented as useful for everything.
  
  To be honest, as someone who's very interested in computer generated text and poetry and the like, I find generic LLMs far less interesting than more traditional markov chains because they're too good at reproducing clichés at the exclusion of anything surprising or whimsical. So I don't think they're very good for the unfactual either. Probably a homegrown neural network would have better results.
- It's useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don't mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.
- Let's be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don't think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label "potentially useful" on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold--kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.
  
  I'm saying ChatGPT is not useless.
  I'm a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can't trust it will be perfect, but I can't trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I've done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.
  I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.
- actually you know what? with all the motte and baileying, you can take a month off. bye!
  
  Petition to replace "motte and bailey" per the Batman clause with "lying like a dipshit".
- Does a sealion have bootlicker nature? Ugh.

What is up wit h the design of this website. There's huge amounts of dead space.
The content though... it just reads like somebody who's pretty angry. I do like the odd rant here and there, but this one misses the mark. "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" was much more to my liking (despite the damn 3 column design).
Anti Commercial-AI license
- sorry you don't like anger! we'll improve your lemmyverse experience
  
  been a little while since we had A Programming Dot Dev here, I think. guess it was time
- What is up wit h the design of this website. There's huge amounts of dead space.
  The content though... it just reads like somebody who's pretty angry. I do like the odd rant here and there, but this one misses the mark. "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" was much more to my liking (despite the damn 3 column design).

Perhaps because I paused to read a little of the Dunciad before continuing with this essay, I think many of its attacks lack the precision and wit to justify their viciousness. I'm generally sympathetic to the premise, but whatever its merits it does not compare all that well with Alexander Pope. Maybe there is more insight and entertainment yet to be derived from comparing ChatGPT itself to Dulness.
- profound reasoning indeed, this way to the egress so you can contemplate further

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