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tedsandersyesterday at 9:53 PM1 replyview on HN

Not sure, to be honest. I don’t think I have any special insight here. My own approach is conversations with friends and family, and the occasional social media post. Exposure and experience are the best teachers, and that’s one reason I’m happy OpenAI tries to make their models generally available. But you could argue, perhaps correctly, that broad access to dumber models actually causes the public to update in the wrong direction on AI.


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thoughtpeddleryesterday at 10:02 PM

My experience as a practitioner and educator in the space lead me to think it might be an issue of how AI cannot be easily perceived at a 'classical level' by most humans. In other words, people are 'far from the metal' when using consumer AI tools, and that leads them to develop the wrong understanding about it. When I provide a demo of e.g. local AI, say in LM Studio showing the console of it rapidly flashing through thousands of words in just a few seconds, and my machine heats up and the fans spin, the 'theatrics' of it, the very real-time feedback from the system, make people correctly update about what the tech is capable of, how it works, etc (despite what they may have heard online cranks say to the contrary). But I am only one person, and there is only so much of that I can do on my own that will 'scale' in time... (and this is to say nothing about severe deficits in peoples' understanding of how weights are not verbatim representations of data, how pre-training vs post-training works, the models as amnesiacs (and hence 'one-way single-purpose conversations'), how context/memory works, context rot, etc - and hence all the 2nd and 3rd order effects that can arise from such a paradigm, e.g. unintended consequences from agent swarms, etc)