I think we’re not adapted well for this rapidly changing world. Here you have some people who were rightly skeptical about a new technology being shoved down their throats by giant tech corporations, and a technology that really was, and probably still is overhyped.

Yet it’s a technology which has rapidly grown in its capabilities.

So yeah now many of the people who thought it was useless before probably don’t think it’s useless anymore, but you’re holding them to their original words even though those words were about something completely different at this point.

If people aren’t saying it anymore it might be because they don’t think that anymore, and the people who have new goal posts might be entirely different people.

It’s like you’re looking at a different set of goal posts on a different field and saying, no! The goalposts have moved!

People have definitely not stopped saying this stuff.

Some quotes from a day ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48957779:

> I hold my stance that LLMs are stochastic parrots... Making the parrots ever more complex and training

> Except solving problem is probably the least (even though it's important) interesting thing in research.

> Can we use AI to get a cure for cancer yet? Or is math-turbation the only thing these things are good for?

> Train on enough examples and statistical autocomplete gets you places. I'm surprised how anyone would even consider this intelligence?

And, as much as HN has declined in the grips of an anti-AI psychosis, Reddit is worse. I would love if social fora would switch to the reasonable claim that we're in a bubble; that's something that can be debated. That's not the dominant critique of AI, though.

I don't think the (fairly factual) description of these systems as stochastic parrots means that they will never do useful work, just that they are not intelligent in the way we believe animals to be (to "push back" on your anecdata, I've also heard fewer people claiming that LLMs are actually conscious in the past year -- maybe we're reaching the happy medium?). That was the point the stochastic parrots paper and Chinese room thought experiments were making -- nobody claimed that the man in the Chinese room would be unable to accurately translate Chinese text.

Fuzzers are another kind of stochastic generator but nobody would claim they don't do useful work in a way that is hard to replicate through deterministic methods. (I still find the code these models produce kind of awful, but advancements in harnesses do mean that they can finally produce code that works most of the time.)

the ROI just isn't there. they aren't making these capital investments back in the next decade even.

not to mention the trillions yet to be spent.

it kinda all works but it's an earth-scale blood from a stone. the resources needed to even do these parlor tricks is nutso.