Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.

I would argue that elaborating on scattered bits and pieces found here and there throughout the Internet is enormously valuable. Fair attribution is the tricky part.

The goalposts will continue moving until morale improves.

Agreed, pr and nothing more. Just more stealing from big corps

Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.

Yes, imagine it's a book cipher and then you hand it to a tool which famously has had every book in existence cleaved apart and fed into it.

Apparently neither found it worth pursuing, and just phoned it in.

> “…leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.“

And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago.

You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.

EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Yup.

Listen there’s no doubt LLM’s are powerful. BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS.

It’s getting tiresome seeing the same bull shit over and over.

The labs have invested hundreds of billions and now need to show RSI. It’s not happening and won’t happen. Without continual new information supplied by humans the models would freeze.

The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning?

Call me naive or old, but I don't see a need to think critically when you have a tool that can outmatch you in that.

I tried drawing analogies with Chess, but it doesn't work. Shall I ask AI to do that for me?

If we think that machines that recombine and interpolate our prior out are intelligent then yes we have probably peaked as a species. Anyway evolution is not telological. It may surprise HN posters but people were as intelligent if not more so as present thousands of years ago. When a problem is solved is more a question of attention, reward, available knowledge base, etc. intelligence is an adaptation to solve the problems of biological life. It would be hard to argue that solving this cypher would have increased anyone's reproductive fitness that much hence it was unsolved. Unsolved problems are often so less because of intrinsic difficulty but lack of conditions that impell their resolution. It is not at all surprising that llms with the full human knowledge base at their disposal, ample computational resources, and the programmed reward of finding the best completion are solving unsolved problems nobody needed to solve anyway. This however is not intelligence in the human sense. Humans solve problems for biological advantage in a dynamic landscape. Llms solve problems to optimize a completion function in a fixed pre trained one.

> The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning?

This is a crucial question but I'm afraid the ship has sailed. We should focus on how to prevent atrophy and cultivate our skills in spite of LLMs. For me and many others this means doing thins the old way with occasional assistance from LLMs that actually increase our understanding. Occassional because if you do it often, you get intellectual atrophy because you stop even trying.

This is all valid and I am with you here. However I can totally imagine kids in 10 years viewing writing code by hand same as we view making fire using flint and steel: yes can be useful, but why bother?

Except in this case I fear we're losing something very important as opposed to the above example.

If you are going out camping in some form of wilderness (harder and harder every year due to the crowds), it can be very useful. I think of LLM use as the same- we'll just have different problems to solve for. Now we have to think about lighter fluid and know how a lighter works. I really don't think we've lost anything by not using flint and steel- anyone can learn how to do it in a couple minutes.

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They cannot yet outmatch humans in critical thinking. Heck, they cannot outmatch a mediocre person like me yet. How many times have we awen "You are right...." Even on sota models?

They are great tools for research and tasks as of now.

I think they can match a human in critical thinking, but they can't match a human in coherence and meta-thinking. You can prompt an LLM to critically think of any idea you want and it's often able to do so, but it's rarely going to do that by itself.

>BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS

humans rely on human inputs. can then talk about the small number of humans who push the boundaries of knowledge and then talk about when LLMs solve difficult math problems...

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to. No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity. But there is a fundamental difference between human creativity and the statistical processing of large amounts of data in an artificial neural network. The latter can yield new insights for the person operating the LLM. But if the insight was more or less contained 1-to-1 in the training data, this confirms the observation that the original contribution of LLMs consists mainly of unearthing relevant facts, but is otherwise very limited when it comes to synthetic judgments (in the Kantian sense).

If the claims made by LLM manufacturers regarding these systems' own capabilities repeatedly turn out to be little more than a hoax, critics of this practice shouldn't simply be dismissed as Luddites. Instead, we should acknowledge that, despite their remarkable capabilities, these systems ultimately deliver far, far, far less than what the snake-oil salesmen—cruising through the valley in their Koenigseggs—repeatedly promise to the public and investors. Anyone who still hasn't grasped this, even though it's so obvious, should urgently focus more on what is actually the case and less on what is being sold to us as the future. Anyone who thinks that technological leaps can simply be extrapolated linearly like this is just naive!

>There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to.

I am not an LLM advocate (nor am I an LLM skeptic), I simply observe and think about what I see. So, I guess your comment is not intended for me?

>No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity.

I read this as something a skeptic would write as apologium for himself: "I am stubborn and stick my heels in when presented with something new, first at productivity, but when forced to retreat, now taking a stand at creativity."

but again, you are defending/attacking a point that doesn't apply to me. I wrote originally to say "they learn from humans" was not a good argument against LLMs because humans learn from other humans. (a simple point which was why my comment was simple)

Very few humans are Aristotle, Newton, or Einstein, and those three were as well building on the work of others.

I did not see a single bold claim of these discoveries or those "self-building models" that Claude and others have internally with a proof of their existence.

So yes, I am also skeptical. I think these companies are more intoncartelizing and colluding via propaganda than delivering stuff. They do deliver some, but very far from their promises.

These companies dangerously mimic behaviors I usually attribute to politicians.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Issac Newton, in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke

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how many humans would invent writing without being taught in school? how about algebra? how about arabic numeral-ing?

and you have no idea how humans reason, but LLMs are neural networks, what do you think neural refers to?

Nobody invented writing. Various people probably independently started making marks on things to signify amounts of stuff. Some people drew likenesses of things. This continued for millenia and became more and more elaborate. It wasn’t born from someone’s head on a single fateful day. All human endeavor is like that, from the most minute thing like carpentry nails to the most elaborate. All of it is the result of collaboration between us and our ancestors.

you restated "humans learn from other humans, and slowly at that" so I guess you are indicating that computers do it faster, this activity of learning from other humans.

I said the same thing you mean, "no human will invent writing, they can only use writing as a productivity tool because they learned it from other humans. Therefore, in the context of my comment, saying "they learn from humans" is not a valid criticism of LLMs because humans also learn from humans, or live like cavemen"

you are agreeing with me, just hot under the collar about it.

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a fuckboy is a sexually attractive and amourously successful male that women who want to tie a man down should stay away from. you've begun to suss out my username! now add in the fsck aspect

Your opinion is contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus. Hearing a plausible assertion should not be enough to believe it, friend.

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Please leave HN. Reddit misses you.