> The OP is still in the "denial" phase.

This was written in July 2023. ChatGPT was released November 2022. No matter your views on AI, surely you can't blame the OP for writing this after a few months ChatGPT was released.

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bonoboTP 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apologies. The title should be amended with (2023). In this case it is an interesting snapshot of the zeitgeist back then and we can see how well it panned out and whether anyone involved has updated on new info.

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mettamage 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm happy you wrote your comment though. For funzies I'm imagining that your comment is also written back in 2023.

That'd have been a hoot and a riot to watch. And I definitely would've grabbed my popcorn, haha.

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woah 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For some reason the anti-AI camp ping pongs between different and often mutually incompatible arguments at lightning speed. The "AI is fake" argument has been completely forgotten at this point.

	▲	bigbadfeline 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> For some reason the anti-AI camp ping pongs Is the anti-AI camp with us in the room right now? Or is it a crude strawman to summarily denigrate any objections to certain features of current AI? AI isn't some homogeneous mass, it can have good and bad sides, and it's always amendable to improvement. Treating the current state of AI as the only possible hides the very idea of improvement. > between different and often mutually incompatible arguments at lightning speed. Of course - there's no homogeneous AI camp either, but there are bot farms, sh^t-posters and sh^t-posting bot farms, different entities with different opinions should not be mistaken for a single stream changing at "lightning speed".
	▲	Yizahi 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You are confusing multiple people making multiple different arguments, and those people your are talking about often aren't articulate enough about their ideas. There are many mutually independent opinions about AI from IT crowd. - AI is extremely useful for many individuals. - AI is extremely damaging to our society as a whole. - AI companies possibly may be (or at least were) deep in red and possibly would require bailing out. - AI is not going anywhere. - A person can use AI extensively AND genuinely hate it and forecast general economic slump because of it at the same time. And likely many other ideas in the same vein. And by the way, I'm not here saying that I'm anywhere good about describing the issues about AI, those items above are just some examples to illustrate the scope of opinions. My point is that you can't just take one single argument from a big group of people, deconstruct it (correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't matter) and then claim that ALL arguments of such big group of people are false. It's not a constructive dialog. PS: also despite the accusations of goal-post shifting, a vast majority of opinions here on HN didn't actually change over the past few years.
	▲	watwut 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A person accirately describing highly hyped project is ... a person accurately describing flaws of that thing.
	▲	senordevnyc 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nah, you still see those people posting here, saying that LLMs are useless for coding. I have no idea what they’re on about at this point.

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brazukadev 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, isn't it interesting that it makes your reply a bit awkward too?

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bananaflag 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Scott Alexander predicted LLMs will write math proofs in 2019:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

Of course people were skeptical:

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/aslze7/gpt2...

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bonoboTP 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Despite the fact that I'm not culturally or geographically connected to them at all and have some differences in taste and aesthetic, I have to conclude that this crowd, including him and Gwern etc. have been much better at understanding and predicting things than the expert takes you find in the media. That includes AI but also things like covid and others.

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sheafification 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m not seeing anything like a falsifiable prediction that LLMs will write math proofs in that article.

I see a thought experiment about giving GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and [compute]” but that’s not falsifiable. That’s also not how we got to modern GPT models.

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famouswaffles 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

He's pretty clearly saying he beilieves the technology capable of such a feat, at least in theory, which is far more than many would deign to admit even a year ago, nevermind 7. He had the right idea/model of LLM capabilities, which is more than you could say for a lot of people, even in this very thread.

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sheafification 10 hours ago | parent [-]

If that’s your standard for what counts as prediction, Asimov beat him to it by seventy-ish years.

EDIT:

> Scott made comments on a specific emerging technology

He was speculating on what would happen if one gave GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and compute.” It’s a thought experiment, not a prediction. Near-infinite amounts of anything is a fantasy.

I acknowledge that he has predicted some things in a falsifiable way and turned out correct, but this isn’t one of them. You’re reading hindsight into the text.

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famouswaffles 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I acknowledge that he has predicted some things in a falsifiable way and turned out correct, but this isn’t one of them. You’re reading hindsight into the text.

I read that blog years ago. Believe me, my opinions are not hindsight.

>Incorrect. He was speculating on what would happen if one gave GPT-2 “near-infinite training data and compute.” It’s a thought-experiment, not a prediction. Near-infinite amounts of anything is a fantasy.

Thought experiments can generate predicitons. His claim was essentially: If you scale data and compute sufficiently, this technology can learn enough of the underlying structure of mathematics to write proofs.

This is meaningful when others around you are saying this is a dead end and that the technology is fundamentally incapable of this regardless of degree of investment and scaling. It shows a much better calibrated sense of the potential of the architecture than those who said otherwise.

If your objection is that "near infinite" makes it insufficiently quantitative to count as a falsifiable forecast, then fine. But at that point we're mostly arguing over what deserves the label "prediction" rather than whether Scott correctly identified an important capability the architecture could develop.

And i'm not trying to say this makes Scott (or the lesswrong crowd) geniuses.

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famouswaffles 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1. Asimov wrote science fiction stories. As far as his robots were concerned, he did not make any comments on the possible future direction/capabilities of any specific technology at the time. This meant he could imagine his robots however he wanted for his fictional world. Scott made comments on a specific emerging technology - You can imagine math proof writing robots but be unconvinced they could emerge from Generative Pre-trained Transformers.

2. The genre is alternatively called speculative fiction for a reason. Yes, some sci-fi works do count as predictions especially when hinged on concrete emerging technologies.

	▲	watwut an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Lesswrong people are also scifi writers. Asimov is ji ust more self aware and better writer.

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bananaflag 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay here's one of his explicit predictions, from 2018 (before LLMs) about 2023:

"If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/15/five-more-years/

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sheafification 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The context shows he was simply whining about AGI skeptics back in 2018, and many of the “predictions” he makes in that paragraph (including the one you quoted) are trivially wrong because he phrased them so hyperbolically and categorically.

Anyway, there were plenty of normies who thought images generated by e.g. stable diffusion (c. 2022) was “real art” and equivalent to human artwork.

I don’t think it’s useful to glaze Scott (or any of the LW crowd for that matter) as if he was (or they were) some kind of prophet(s). They got a couple points right, sure, but most of it was them flinging armchair philosophy spaghetti against the wall and seeing who would fund MIRI to let them fling the next batch.

	▲	bananaflag 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Okay, fair enough.

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phi0 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> surely you can't blame the OP for writing this after a few months ChatGPT

Bad takes are bad takes. The author was perplexed by the "many people" convinced that models are intelligent and is argued against opinions/arguments he's been exposed to. Called proposed use-cases "borderline fraudulent pseudoscience."

He also published a second edition of "The Intelligence Illusion" in Sep 2025, so seemingly still stands by (some variant of) this belief.

It's an interesting reminder of how much general discourse has shifted since 2023 (I haven't heard of stochastic parrots in months!) but being wrong early doesn't change that.