I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.
That's because a lot of commenters here are not hackers in any real sense; rather, they're software engineers. Perhaps this hasn't always been the case.
Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.
Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.
...good question. This (standard) excuse is designed to make you feel bad for potentially insulting someone trying their hardest, but it doesn't make any sense.
But flying machines are well defined, or at least it's easily possible to come up with a good definition. 'A machine capable of transporting a person from a to b without touching the ground at any point in between', or whatever.
Well there are paper darts and weather balloons but most people were interested in a powered machine to transport people. Likewise with AGI but I'm guessing most people are thinking of something that can do what people do?
People did genuinely struggle to define "useful flying machine", which is why you see the description of the Wright Brother's flight come with so much detail: "first controlled, sustained flight of a powered airplane".
And because ALL the marketing AND UX around LLMs is precisely trying to imply that they are thinking. It's not just the challenge of grasping the ridiculous amount of resources poured in, which does including training sets, it's because actual people are PAID to convince everybody those tools are actually thinking. The prompt is a chatbox, the "..." are there like a chat with a human, the "thinking" word is used, the "reasoning" word is used, "hallucination" is used, etc.
You're right. Unfortunately, it seems that not many are willing to admit this and be (rightly) impressed by how remarkably effective LLMs can be, at least for manipulating language.
