A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z

Since the commit history is public, there's a much easier way to tell that AI had a hand in writing that list.

https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...

> opus descriptions in cursor, raw

I wish I had as many positive experience as it seems some other HNers have with LLMs. I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was Google's Gemini Promotion!

All it really needed to do to my first query was say something like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked, "won't the towel suck up all the butter?"

This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini). For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6 times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times. For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But, when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it ever works.

And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!

Keep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.

It would have been really great to end the blog post mid-sentence.

Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.

And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".

Of course the irony ist that if a big corporation publishes a year-end reading list, it has the implicit message of "hey we are not just a group of boring corporate robots - we're people, with real feelings, and hobbies like reading, and taste."

And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.

It's definitely written by an AI. The end description of hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.

All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.

Stephenson? Ah yes, the deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.

Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are conflated.

He has my admiration, I wouldn't have been able to write an article like this and resist the urge to end it mid

The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).

https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...

> I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this.

Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.

I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.

i didn’t want to be bothered with the shift key so i stopped using it and called it culture. but now i don’t even have to finish my

Stephenson’s endings are fine.

Wished he'd spend as much as effort on writing endings for his books as on that blog post.

Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.

due to constant mis-use like this, literally has even been redefined to not necessarily mean its primary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

In these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This seems like the most likely explanation.

The footnote is precious, everything Humpty related is not.

“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.”

is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.

For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.

It's the same guys who get impressed if you are playing a video game while talking to them.

The most likely option of all was the article was written without that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over one throwaway sentence lol.

I thought it was a joke? Like the reviewer is saying, "I didn't finish these books".

He needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the process of doing that, given this sentence from the article: “This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.”

These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.

Missed chance to end the article mid sentence

Sssh, Neal. They’ll do to you what they did to Michael O. Ch

a16z is such a joke. Prototype of people with no taste and way too much money.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

— Maya Angelou

Silicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read or think about anything other than a small set of standardized scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty bad.

Another hypothesis: https://xkcd.com/725/.

Could be some very dry humor? Confused LLM seems most likely though.

He should have ended this essay mid-sencence, because that would