Yet to see anything good come from it, and I’m not talking about machine learning for specific use cases.

And if we look at the players who are the winners in the AI race, do you see anyone particularly good participating?

800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT. My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it. To do the contrary would be highly egoistic and suggest that I am somehow more intelligent than all those people and I know more about what they want for themselves.

I could obviously give you examples where LLMs have concrete usecases but that's besides the larger point.

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manuelmoreale 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 1B people in the world smoke. The fact something is wildly popular doesn’t make it good or valuable. Human brains are very easily manipulated, that should be obvious at this point.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Almost all smokers agree that it is harmful for them.

Can you explain why I should not be equally suspicious of gaming, social media, movies, carnivals, travel?

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manuelmoreale 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You should be. You should be equally suspicious of everything. That's the whole point. You wrote:

> My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it.

Enough people doing something doesn't make that something good or desirable from a societal standpoint. You can find examples of things that go in both directions. You mentioned gaming, social media, movies, carnivals, travel, but you can just as easily ask the same question for gambling or heavy drugs use.

Just saying "I defer to their judgment" is a cop-out.

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stavros an hour ago | parent [-]

Ok, I'll bite: What's the harm of LLMs?

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manuelmoreale an hour ago | parent [-]

We don't know yet? And that's how things usually go. It's rare to have an immediate sense of how something might be harmful 5, 10, or 50 years in the future. Social media was likely considered all fun and good in 2005 and I doubt people were envisioning all the harmful consequences.

	▲	simianwords 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure continue to be skeptical of everything. Even on Netflix, even on music even on sports. Your type of people always existed, they were skeptical of homosexuality, intermarriage. Your role is essential to keep progress somewhat in check but that’s all there is to it. Progress will continue.

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techpression 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t do zero sum games, you can normalize every bad thing that ever happened with that rhetoric. Also, someone benefiting from something doesn’t make it good. Weapons smuggling is also extremely beneficial to the people involved.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes but if I go with your priors then all of these are similarly to be suspect

- gaming

- netflix

- television

- social media

- hacker news

- music in general

- carnivals

A priori, all of these are equally suspicious as to whether they provide value or not.

My point is that unless you have reason to suspect, people engaging in consumption through their own agency is in general preferable. You can of course bring counter examples but they are more of caveats against my larger truer point.

	▲	techpression 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Social media for sure and television and Netflix in general absolutely. But again, providing value is not the same as something being good. A lot of people think inaccuracies by LLMs to be of high value because it’s provided with nice wrappings and the idea that you’re always right.