Item — HN Reader

I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have? If that’s the opinion, may be good to reflect on how the models were trained. On millions upon millions of books which no authors were compensated for.

But that’s besides the point, the whole initiative is self-defeating by design. This isn’t like power, it’s something humans do inherently possess, this is simply a way to amplify what already exists. Intelligent people using AI generally seem to be more productive than when they don’t use it, and lazy or unintelligent people generally see cognitive decline, at least based on what I’ve heard online but I could be wrong on that.

So saying “this is where you get intelligence” is both false marketing and destructive to OpenAI as a company, since by all definitions, it isn’t true.

6 comments

> I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have?

Your body also generates electricity and natural gas. Do you also get upset when energy companies claim to provide these services as a utility?

Is the electricity or natural gas that your body produces a defining feature of humanity?

Does AI actually provide intelligence?

"Humans also produce farts" is a new low. Can the AI people be interned or moved to some seasteading libertarian hellhole so the rest of us can live a normal life?

I think we’ll need certified human/no-ai communities at some point in the near future.

My brother is actually moving to one (although that's not the core focus of the community, but they are extremely sceptical of AI there).

I suspect in a few years it's going to be strange to talk to him and other people there. It's already hard to explain to people that "Yeah, you can have a phone call and it can sound like your dad but it might just be a chat bot."

I'm in, where do we start?

If I never have to hear anything about AI ever again it will be too soon

Then perhaps their signalling isn't meant for you but for people who have to pay those pesky expensive intelligent people like translators, programmers, designers and writers. Those people would benefit greatly if they could rent intelligence much cheaper from companies like OpenAI.

> providing intelligence as a utility

Lol, they are literally just promising to make people fungible. Tale as old as time.

LLMs are like a search engine that autocompletes. It's a tool.

you can say the same thing of the watts in a person too

>I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have?

We do and we don't. If you would go out there and talk to a random person about elliptic curves and matrix multiplications and whether you hit a performance ceiling in a specific 2x2 multiplication thingy with Karatsuba and wnaf, they would not know half the words, but the lying and flattering machine will be able to hold the conversation.

The thing will not get all things right and bullshit me about DSTU4145 using normal basis, will lie about A being set to 1 for all standard curves, but it's definitely more intelligence that you can get from a taxi driver.

If it's not general superintelligence right there for five bucks a piece, I don't know what is

None of those things qualify as intelligence.

Is a calculator intelligent? I can 'talk' to it via pushing buttons.

In a limited way it is more intelligent than some people, but it doesn't generalise.

80085

Proof that we reached AGI 50 years ago

Is a dictionary intelligent?

These philosophical questions are decades if not older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room And the answer is "depends on who you ask and how many capabilities it has"

Does the prayer by a kafir not knowing the language in which the prayer is recited get forgiveness?

I mean, what's the point of this question even. The thing is either useful or fun or it's not. I personally think the whole AI is the work of devil tempting us, but some people would say that about pork sausages and Paulaner and I like my pork sausages with Paulaner.

> We do and we don't. If you would go out there and talk to a random person about elliptic curves and matrix multiplications and whether you hit a performance ceiling in a specific 2x2 multiplication thingy with Karatsuba and wnaf, they would not know half the words, but the lying and flattering machine will be able to hold the conversation.

Wikipedia has existed for decades...

You can't talk to wikipedia either, but it exists and is helpful, yes.