Raw LLM Responses

Love people calling “AI” skeptics Luddites. First… the Luddites weren’t entirely wrong. But that’s a debate for another time. :P Second, I starting coding HTML in 1993… and had already been using and programming computers for 15 years. I’m a third generation computer nerd (My mom did keypunch in the 70’s and transitioned to DB development by the 90’s, both my grandparents worked for a place called Sperry Rand… that’s a fun google!) with deep roots in the silly con valley and a refugee of the 2001 dot.bomb. Maybe that’s the problem; I’ve had first hand experience at the serious quantities of hype that can doom a new technology by the sheer audaciousness of the over-promise. A great example is voice dictation; I first encountered this in *1988* when Dragonsoft did a demo at MacUser Magazine in Foster City. Then, and over the next 20 plus years, it always demoed like magic… and like magic the results were almost impossible to reproduce. Specialized headsets, constant “training” sessions, various vendors making the attempt... even Apple struggled with it until iPhone voice dictation started actually working out of the box, though the irony of all those failed training attempts was that I had become skilled in dictating with punctuation and formatting. Search “Duke Nuk’em Forever” or “Fullwrite Professional” for some other examples. “AI” is following that same well worn path; the demos are AMAZING, but as you note incredibly forced and rarely replicated by mere mortals. It’s easy to forget it's not so much AI as Eliza 2.0, only with a million monkeys pounding away at bits until it looks sorta kinda what the prompt suggests to the model. And while all those monkeys might by sheer chance come up with works to rival the genius of, say Shakespeare (or even Roger Zalazny or Kurt Vonnegutt), you would have to wade through a million libraries worth of Gilmore Girls fan fiction (and worse) to get there… and you still have to feed and deal with the excrement of a million bored primates. So what problem did that fix again? When In think billions with a B has been spent on this technology I can’t help but wonder how much amazing art that sum could have patronized in the first place. Anyhow, thank you for this excellent video and the work you’re doing! Gotta love home invaders who are pissed the beer in the fridge was poisoned with a powerful laxative.