FaceDeer

They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about

The problem is that it did summarize the result of this search, the results of this search included one of those "if the Earth was the size of a grain of sand, Alpha Centauri would be X kilometers away" analogies. It did exactly the thing you're saying it can't do.

Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole.

Nothing is perfect. Does that make everything a massive catastrophic threat to humanity? How have we managed to survive for this long?

You're ridiculously overblowing this. It's a "ha ha, looks like AI made a whoopsie because I didn't understand that I actually asked it to do" situation. It's not Skynet coming to convince us to eat cyanide.

And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.

Of course it's ignoring that. It's not real.

You realize that energy costs money? If each web search cost an "obscene" amount, how is Microsoft managing to pay for it all? Why are they paying for it? Do you think they'll continue paying for it indefinitely? It'd be a completely self-solving problem.

I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I've talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.

Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don't want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming "no it doesn't!" In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don't is just silly.

Then go ahead and put "science questions" into one of the areas that you don't use LLMs for. That doesn't make them useless in general.

I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be "they're not good at questions involving numbers." That's narrower than "science questions" in general, they're still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren't good at math so don't use them for math.

Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying "no you don't!" Is frankly ridiculous.

I'm a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.

Our "intelligence" agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots.

So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.

Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they're going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.

"Mathematical magic tricks" can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.

Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.

There's a nice phrase I commonly use, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don't have to be as long as you're prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.

I expect if you follow the references you'd find one of them to be one of those "if Earth was a grain of sand" analogies.

People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.

My understanding is that webp isn't actually all that bad from a technical perspective, it was just annoying because it started getting used widely on the web before all the various tools caught up and implemented support for it.

Replacing people with AI creates a situation where the incentive for people to make original works is greatly diminished,

Why would that be? It should be tye opposite, making VO cheaper means studios can take risks and get experimental. Basically what cheap engines have done for indie development.

Bitcoin is over 15 years old now, that's not a particularly fast speedrun.

It's a specific type of thing, but it's not a brand. Nobody owns the trademark for Bitcoin. Anyone can buy, sell, or mine Bitcoin. It's no more a specific product than dollars are a specific product.

If they added a Bitcoin logo, then you'd see every other crypto lining up to get their logos permanently installed on every person's devices, too.

Is there a problem with that? This isn't "advertising", these are unicode symbols. There are unicode symbols for all kinds of things. Every currency has unicode symbols, why not cryptocurrencies?

What could go wrong with using human programmers to convert it?

If you're going to insist on perfection for something like this then you're probably never going to get anything done. Convert the program and then test and debug it just like you'd do with any newly written code. The idea is to make it easier to do that, not to make it so you don't have to do it at all.