I can’t see that proposed division as anything but a straw-man. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who genuinely thinks of LLMs as an “all-knowing, all-solving oracle” and yet, even in specialist fields, their utility is certainly more than a mere “heuristic”, which of course isn’t to say they don’t have limits. See only Terrance Tao’s reports on his ongoing experiments.
Do you genuinely think it’s worse that someone makes a decision, whether good or bad, after consulting with GPT versus making it in solitude? I spoke with a handyman the other day who unprompted told me he was building a side-business and found GPT a great aid — of course they might make some terrible decisions together, but it’s unimaginable to me that increasing agency isn’t a good thing. The interesting question at this stage isn’t just about “elder parents having nice conversations”, but about computers actually becoming useful for the general population through an intuitive natural language interface. I think that’s a pretty sober assessment of where we’re at today not hyperbole. Even as an experienced engineer and researcher myself, LLMs continue to transform how I interact with computers.
Do you genuinely think it’s worse that someone makes a decision, whether good or bad, after consulting with GPT versus making it in solitude? I spoke with a handyman the other day who unprompted told me he was building a side-business and found GPT a great aid — of course they might make some terrible decisions together, but it’s unimaginable to me that increasing agency isn’t a good thing. The interesting question at this stage isn’t just about “elder parents having nice conversations”, but about computers actually becoming useful for the general population through an intuitive natural language interface. I think that’s a pretty sober assessment of where we’re at today not hyperbole. Even as an experienced engineer and researcher myself, LLMs continue to transform how I interact with computers.