Yet another Hacker News

The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea

31 points joozio 1 hour ago 27 comments

simonw 37 minutes ago | parent

Is this meant to link to the article as opposed to a newsletter that mentions the article?

Article link is: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-...

emil-lp 35 minutes ago | parent

Title

Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype

bananaflag 35 minutes ago | parent

One of the authors is one of the stochastic parrot authors.

simonw 31 minutes ago | parent

Both authors. Stochastic Parrots was Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell - the linked article is by Emily M. Bender and Timnit Gebru.

DonHopkins 7 minutes ago | parent

This made my day! I love it when people on Hacker News mention Stochastic Parrots, and they're actually referring to the paper and its authors, instead of just mindlessly performing a mindless drive-by anti-ai shibboleth by parroting a phrase they heard on the internet without any understanding of what it means or what paper it refers to or what the conclusion and responses to the paper were. Thank you!

But we have to have a talk about stochastic pelicans riding bicycles...

bananaflag 33 minutes ago | parent

> Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.

If someone discovered how to summon demons to aid them in robbing banks the main issue wouldn't be "but who has the responsibility for the crime, the human or the demon", it would be "OMG DEMONS".

Seriously, I don't get what sort of world these people are living in.

ForHackernews 29 minutes ago | parent

If I run a port scanner / vulnerability fuzzer pointed at your network that churns for days and eventually cracks something and breaks your system, would you be upset with me, or my bash loops?

What if you tried to sue me for damages and my defense was, "Your honor, this was a highly advanced AI gone rogue, I couldn't possibly be held negligent, no one could have foreseen this - I accidentally summoned dark magiks from the silicon itself!"

Note the point I'm making: I am not claiming LLMs are equivalent to a for loop, I'm saying that you can't evade moral and legal responsibility through technical obscurantism.

A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

jstanley 23 minutes ago | parent

But they're not obfuscating things just to evade responsibility.

Do you think that OpenAI hacked HuggingFace on purpose and set up the whole LLM training environment thing just to try to evade responsibility? That it was really just a complicated way of hacking HuggingFace on purpose?

Yes, they made a mistake and a system they were responsible for hacked HuggingFace, but the nature of the mistake still matters, and their intent still matters.

> A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

Right, but an EV that explodes because of a fault in the charging circuit is not a bomb, it's an accident. Just because something exploded for complex reasons doesn't make it an obfuscated bomb.

ForHackernews 14 minutes ago | parent

Despite continuously waving their hands and shrieking about how this thing will literally wipe out all of humanity they couldn't be bothered to airgap it from the internet when testing.

So yes, I think it was equivalent to testing their new rocket by launching it over a population center. oops, we didn't intend for it to crash on that preschool, but we also didn't follow the most basic safety protocol imaginable

lukan 28 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for the laugh, but I bet on the internet (and especially here) you surely would find people debating exactly that.

rubendev 21 minutes ago | parent

That's not what the LLM hacking accidents have been like at all though. To improve the analogy, it would be like summoning a totally passive demon, giving it weapons and placing it next to a bank, place a small fence around it, and then command it to perform a totally safe "exercise" that is exactly like robbing a real bank.

LLMs do not have agency, they are just producing tokens based on a prompt that a person entered, and some of these tokens can trigger the tools that a person gave them access to.

Kiro 11 minutes ago | parent

A totally passive demon would still be "OMG DEMONS".

ForHackernews 5 minutes ago | parent

We all agree the demons are cool and potentially dangerous. Chainsaws are pretty sick too.

brainwad 8 minutes ago | parent

The authors (Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender) are dyed-in-the-wool AI denialists. Famously they were the lead authors on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots".

fleshmonad 32 minutes ago | parent

Yeah so tired of this. Stealing all our IP and it can't even write a line of code. I am quite special, it won't change my life, I am irreplaceable. These AIbros are lunatics. Last time I checked it couldn't even count the Rs!!! Time to go back to my important asd special work as a human with SOVL

Tbarlow 14 minutes ago | parent

Feels like the blockchain bubble all over again, just with more impressive demo reels. Still waiting for my LLM to write perfect code.

VCFundedGenYer 11 minutes ago | parent

I maintain the notion that LLMs are just what all NFT grifters moved to after the NFT fad died.

spiderfarmer 7 minutes ago | parent

How many companies depend on perfect code?

ahtcx 5 minutes ago | parent

Do you write perfect code? I was in denial for a long time too, but the reality is this is how software engineering is now. It can handle pretty much any codebase and vastly faster than you ever will be able to. With enough context, it writes good code and it's only getting better.

matkoniecz 4 minutes ago | parent

> Still waiting for my LLM to write perfect code.

I am not writing perfect code either.

simianwords 3 minutes ago | parent

I want to understand the minds of people who think LLM is like blockchain bubble haha

themgt 11 minutes ago | parent

It's a tough situation when your claim to fame is "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" arguing models should be kept to < GPT-2 size because larger models will serve no purpose or function:

Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whetheror not they do [89, 140]. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model).

And then they make 100x bigger models cranking out solutions to Navier Stokes, Jacobian Conjecture and countless other extremely impressive unsolved problems

Let's see how Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender describe these events:

As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially “stunned” by OpenAI’s press release saying that its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade”—but they later realized that the results weren’t as “novel as first appeared.” Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism, and they’ve reiterated that Astra didn’t make a “profound intellectual leap.”

Decide for yourself whether that's a summary written by intellectually honest people.

According to the AI industry, we should be more worried about a fictional machine god than ... the water that is redirected to cooling them.

Spoiler: they're not intellectually honest people.

daveguy 2 minutes ago | parent

Spoiler: openai could neither confirm nor deny that the model that "solved" navier stokes was trained on the chat logs of the mathematicians who did solve it using a similar technique.

spiderfarmer 9 minutes ago | parent

People aren't seeing the forest through the trees.

While lots of developers, journalists, analysts, investors and influencers are bickering about AGI, goalposts, benchmarks, hypes and fears, entire markets are being transformed silently and steadily.

I don't program anymore. (Massive change)

I removed tons of technical debt (Massive change, lol)

I am easily 10x more productive (Massive change)

The quality of 'my' code is easily 10x better and contains less bugs (I was never principled, pedantic or a guru, lol)

I sleep better and I also make more money as a result. I'm constantly amazed by all changes and improvements. There are so many opportunities to profit from this that I can't be bothered with discussions about hypotheticals.