alt Hacker NewsPersonally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds.
That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for their intelligence.
Well that's just my 2 cents.
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You're correct on the technology assessment.
But you forget all development today is just searching for a template, copy pasting, changing some small things. And a smart-ish search engine can do all that.
I think this viewpoint fails to understand what "intelligence" is. The idea must be that intelligence is some special thing that only humans have. So when machines couldn't do jack s... we said "it's the Turing test". When machines blew through the Turing test we said "that was just prediction..not really intelligence, that's different".
It's not different. The delusion humans have is that intelligence is special and magical. It's not. It's just nature's prediction machine. A very fancy version to be sure. But not qualitatively different .
All statements that "oh but it'll never be able to do that" will prove false.
Sooooo what does it matter if we do 99% of things a LLM can just solve as a 'advanced search engine'?
Btw. an advanced search engine is probably the worst comparision i have read so far.
A LLM is a latent space which is capable of a lot of things a search engine can't do. It can apply different type of patterns and flows onto data, it can combine these etc.
My 'advanced search engine' was just able to create a working PR for exactly what i wanted it to solve (fixing a bug) by analysing the bug, finding a valid solution then commiting the solution itself.