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sersi • today at 8:24 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

One doesn't invalidate the other. Yes LLMs have been very successful at solving math problems when guided by mathematicians who know what they're doing. The same is true for emulating a PS5 or (insert cool new project of the week developed with LLM).

On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false. So, I'd say productivity gains are true but there's also a cost of wrong information being used to make decisions due to AI.


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egeozcan • today at 10:27 AM

> On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false

When talk to people, I regularly see them confidently claim information that is false as well.

This is not the point where LLMs become useless. LLMs become useless when we understand that we are social creatures and that many times the road is more important than the destination. Also, when you provide instant-travel to all the destinations, the destinations lose their value as well.

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egecant • today at 9:32 AM

I think a lot of the problems or gains attributed to AI are just reflections of the humans that use them.

I dont care if you used AI to produce something. If you share it with me, I assume you are responsible for it. You own it, whether you agree or not.

> it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before

What is the direction of causality here? Does AI make people jerks, or they were already or prone to be jerks?

The same applies to innovations or breakthroughs made by people who use AI in their work.

> LLMs are solving novel math problems and successfully emulated a PS5

Did the AI independently accomplish those things, or did highly competent people accomplish them using AI as a tool?

What would happen if you give someone with no mathematical or programming background the same frontier models that OpenAI used for their mathematical proofs [1]. Would they produce the same discoveries?

I think of humans as constants. They can bring positive, or negative value to the table. The AI is the multiplier.

Take software engineering. If you let someone who doesnt care about code quality (their constant is negative since any code they write will introduce a tech debt) push code to your repo using AI, it will destroy your project. But let an engineer with strong fundamentals and high standards use AI to push code to your repo, they can improve the project much faster than they could without AI.

[1] https://github.com/openai/math/

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shinywth23 • today at 10:55 AM

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