alt Hacker NewsLLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.
I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber duck. It liked all the suggestions I pitched for the design, but I only went with the last one after discarding the others.
The others were all fine and would have worked, but they weren't the best that I found.
Back to the point, if we're getting average guidance from the AI and we're just offloading our thinking process at that level, then I could sure see it panning out like TFA says.
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Agreed. The test I run is "Can it simplify a concept I know in a matter of sentences/words, better than I can?" on a subject area that requires a lot of nuance.
And to my disappointment, the LLMs never come close. They dump paragraphs upon paragraphs. I actually want to see the LLMs surprise me. But they disappoint me for what Im specifically looking for.
> I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.
Industrial scale dunning kruger/gell man amnesia. We're ~5 years in to the meme of "wow, every white collar profession other than MINE is doomed. But yeah, mine requires really specific domain knowledge, taste, and problem solving, so I'm not super worried about it but it's a very helpful tool"
I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard sell to the person struggling when there's an easy button available.