That was a good read and this Thea Lim is a good writer.
LLMs are an amazing party trick. I can see how many people could fall under the spell. I also had a brief honeymoon with chatgpt and sometimes claude about a year ago.
Thankfully I have always been interested in AI and machine learning and was passingly familiar with Bayes, was just getting into Markov models, and studying Numenta’s system right as the LLMs started hitting the public space. That helped me approach the interactions in a detached way.
Initially, the experience of interacting with something that is both ‘on your level’ and ‘exponentially more knowledgeable’ than you is pretty exhilarating. Every interest is a potential cluster bomb of rabbit holes to run down.
I did all the things you do with a new tool/toy: modded it, tweaked it, tried to see how it worked on the inside, probed its abilities and explored its limitations.
After a few weeks though, a persistent feeling of what I can only describe as the ‘uncanny valley effect of interaction’ kind of rubbed the charm off.
Couple that with keeping a closer eye on the news surrounding the big tech players and you start to get a better sense of the tremendous extent of the grossly unethical practices that went into shoving these products into the hands of everyone.
Once the news broke about openAI taking that DoD contract I said that’s enough for me and wiped the data and deleted the app.
Kind of shame. While llms are much more limited than their veneer of agency suggests, they still are pretty powerful tools in the right roles.
The potential is awesome… if they weren’t already tainted by theft, fraud, and now employed in the manipulation of the minds of the people at scale. Every new model is now more suspect than the last.
Too bad the roadmap every big player has used consists of making the worst possible choices to rush these models to the market. Once again, the overwhelming greed of the capitalists class has poisoned the fruit of decades of scientific research and unleashed a dangerous swarm of threats upon the future of society well before we were ready to grapple with the implications.
That was a good read and this Thea Lim is a good writer.
LLMs are an amazing party trick. I can see how many people could fall under the spell. I also had a brief honeymoon with chatgpt and sometimes claude about a year ago.
Thankfully I have always been interested in AI and machine learning and was passingly familiar with Bayes, was just getting into Markov models, and studying Numenta’s system right as the LLMs started hitting the public space. That helped me approach the interactions in a detached way.
Initially, the experience of interacting with something that is both ‘on your level’ and ‘exponentially more knowledgeable’ than you is pretty exhilarating. Every interest is a potential cluster bomb of rabbit holes to run down.
I did all the things you do with a new tool/toy: modded it, tweaked it, tried to see how it worked on the inside, probed its abilities and explored its limitations.
After a few weeks though, a persistent feeling of what I can only describe as the ‘uncanny valley effect of interaction’ kind of rubbed the charm off.
Couple that with keeping a closer eye on the news surrounding the big tech players and you start to get a better sense of the tremendous extent of the grossly unethical practices that went into shoving these products into the hands of everyone.
Once the news broke about openAI taking that DoD contract I said that’s enough for me and wiped the data and deleted the app.
Kind of shame. While llms are much more limited than their veneer of agency suggests, they still are pretty powerful tools in the right roles.
The potential is awesome… if they weren’t already tainted by theft, fraud, and now employed in the manipulation of the minds of the people at scale. Every new model is now more suspect than the last.
Too bad the roadmap every big player has used consists of making the worst possible choices to rush these models to the market. Once again, the overwhelming greed of the capitalists class has poisoned the fruit of decades of scientific research and unleashed a dangerous swarm of threats upon the future of society well before we were ready to grapple with the implications.