> It would be foolish to deny the effectiveness of image recognizers based on generalized adversarial networks (GANs), the key neural network technology underlying LLMs
I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
Things that are vaguely GAN-shaped might play some role in post training. Though no one would call them GANs or identify them as the key underlying technology.
There is RLHF with a model that's trained to emulate a human evaluator, but the evaluator is not really trained jointly with the main model to adapt to its distribution and tell it from real text. Though I'm sure there are some niche cases when this is done. But definitely not a prominent thing.
Yeah. Ironically, if he used an LLM to proofread his work, it would have told him that GAN's are generative not "generalized". That LLMs are primarily built on Transformers rather than GANs. And that they're more famous for image generation rather than image recognition.
This is a pivot almost all of these "AI is junk and everyone using AI is a fool" pieces -- these things are pablum to many HN users -- resorts to. It's a bit of a "don't presume I'm not actually an expert on such systems, and here I hint to my deep, profound understanding of their inner workings".
It's almost always ignorant nonsense, but somehow it works on some subset of users.
> I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.
Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
It can definitely plan such things. Because agentic systems don't have to output a book all at once. The mainstream still lives 1-2 years in the past.
Agents can plan out a narrative draft, write it out section by section, maybe out of order, then tweak it, plant clues if it wants to, then trigger it in another chapter file etc. Then read the whole thing, reconsider, etc. It can iterate. I'm not saying it will be great literature, but the problem isn't the inability to create long range references.
For some value of "work out" anywhere between "human utopia that spreads across the stars" to "we destroy everything in a ball of nuclear fire and only microbes survive", yes, it will. The universe will keep on going either way.
Speaking as a fucker, I think the use of em-dashes has been pretentious since the 1890s. The rise of typewriters destroyed em-dashes already. The LLMs subsequently created an accidental parody of sophisticated writing.
People seem to LOVE parens, although I was taught that they are almost 100% never the correct thing to use in prose. But apparently "some fucker" will accuse me of being pretentious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.
Parens and em-dashes do different things. A simple parenthetical is an secondary aside (it's a half step towards a footnote). An interrupting phrase is intended to (abruptly) command attention.
I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.
It's like saying I am intimately involved in the printer's art. This is usually not true, unless you're involved with a very niche publisher who still has a box of sorts and inky fingers. Hyphen-minus all the way.
No it doesn't. I happened to have read "design and typography in easy steps" as a (bored) child of the 90s, but that's the extent of my "printer's art" knowledge.
I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1]
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
> This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme in action.
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
You think accelerando is utopian sci fi!? Which characters perspective are you identifying with so strongly? They all have pretty severe societal challenges that makes me surprised to see the word Utopia.
The protagonist who believes that information should be free and that scarcity is mostly artificial due to bad economic models. And that it would be possible to implement proper pro-human capitalism or communism if we had enough compute to solve standard CS problems like filling knapsacks or maximizing flow through a graph.
1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?
I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
AI is so good that if you see an hallucination as obviously wrong like this one it’s a sign it’s written by a human.
It's almost always ignorant nonsense, but somehow it works on some subset of users.
The fact that you got another dead account outright calling for murder is perfectly on brand. Own it. That's who you are.
Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
Agents can plan out a narrative draft, write it out section by section, maybe out of order, then tweak it, plant clues if it wants to, then trigger it in another chapter file etc. Then read the whole thing, reconsider, etc. It can iterate. I'm not saying it will be great literature, but the problem isn't the inability to create long range references.
Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.
I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.
I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163630
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."