Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.

But it's a weird kind of average... Not the 3 from 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 but rather like the bland tv-dinner which tastes non-upsetting for most people.

Perhaps closer to “the mean vector point such that all outbound vectors to different training tests are in sum the smallest”? I assume that’s a property of neural networks anyways, though I’m out of date on current math for them.

Yes, it’s the "sum" of which you extract an average.

I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.

The soft gaussian blur of all human knowledge.

> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.

> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

It's literally what it is. Fairly sure that mathematically it's a fancier regression/prediction so it's a form of average.

You're falsely conflating knowledge with intelligence