The rate of progress can be high and they can also be dumb next token predictors. Not sure why that is hard to understand.

These models can do a lot of things but they also can't do a lot of things. In order to use these models effectively you have to understand that they are next token predictors and how that allows it to do what they do.

Not a dichotomy actually. Highly depends on the task.

Would be nice to get high karma commenter votes count only ..

Not sure what your point is? Those things can both be true.

Or should the discourse in a diverse community like HN only reflect the positions you personally hold?

Opinions differ. This is not news.

It's almost as if there were many people using this site, and there is no clear consensus on LLMs, so people from various camps upvote interesting stores to support their cause. And people who are still somewhat undecided upvote both, if they present good evidence.

I mean even perennially contentious topics will get this behavior.... some thing about emacs makes the front page, within a day or two there will be a vim post up there. Same with Rust is (good|bad), or if systemd creates an even more awesome tool, the haters will come along and recycle stories about bugs from over a decade ago.

There's a lot of people here. Not all of them read it every hour, and discussions like this among large groups often take a very long time with lots of repetition. Human group dynamics (aka politics) is slow.

> So tired of this discourse and this site.

You're welcome to leave if you don't like it. The site was like this long before you joined, and will like it long after you leave I'm sure.

It's also worth noting, that an awful lot of math discoveries are perfectly in line with dumb next token generators - they are finding a way to formally construct an argument and being surprised when it doesn't work, or surprised at the outcome of the grind. Not all of them are made by brilliant leaps of intuition.