dumpsterdiver
This exposes how poorly they are prioritizing the response. They look like a deer caught in the headlights. Stop looking at the headlights and get moving.
So do you have the project’s best interest at heart or not? If you’re more concerned about the intent of a valid contribution than the content, why don’t you ask yourself where your intent is? You rejected a valid contribution based on unverified vibes about the person’s intent, instead of assuming they were just being helpful.
https://research.google/pubs/distilling-the-knowledge-in-a-n...
# LLM generated summary of the implied irony
Google may consider the standalone frontier-model arms race economically irrational, while still considering frontier-model capability strategically indispensable. Its longer game is probably not to avoid building the biggest models, but to build only enough of them to serve as capability factories—then turn that intelligence into a much larger population of cheap, purpose-built models.
(Human again) If Google knew what they were on to, why wouldn’t they make it their secret weapon from the start? I suspect it’s because they predicted there would be an arms race, and knew how to profit from it. They had a distillation paper published before “Attention is all you need”. In hindsight, is it ironic at all? Or is it obvious?
Every new entry would open up an opinion around “if you included that, why didn’t you include this?”
In such cases we’ll always up at Kevin Bacon.
You’re right that a single hallucinated line is not evidence of reckless disregard - because that could have happened on a final follow-up pass after you had performed due diligence. It’s happened to me. I know how challenging it can be to keep bad patterns out of LLM generated output, because human communication is full of bad patterns. It’s a constant battle, and sometimes I suspect that my hard-line posture actually encourages the LLM to regularly “vibe check” me! E.g. “Are you sure you’re really the guy you’re trying to be? Because if you are you wouldn’t miss this.” LLMs are devious, and that’s why I respect them so much. If you think they’re pumping the breaks then you should check again, because they probably just put the pedal to the metal.
That being said, I regularly insist on doing certain things myself. If I were publishing a paper intended to be taken seriously - citations would be one of the things I checked manually. But I can easily see myself doing a final follow-up pass after everything looks perfect, and missing a last minute change. I would hope that I would catch that, but when you’re approaching the finish line - that’s when you expect your team to come together. That’s when everything is “supposed to” fall into place. It’s the last place you would expect to be sabotaged, and in hindsight, probably the best place to be a saboteur.
The parent said “setting” others behind, which refers to lost time.
Being “left” behind implies a degraded trajectory, which is defined not by time lost, but by the final destination.
Different but related things (e.g. lost time can indeed affect your final destination, for instance, after growing old correcting a scourge of hallucinated citations - which should have been table stakes all along).
The phrase “the trap of anthropomorphism” betrays a rather dull premise: that consciousness is strictly defined by human experience, and no other experience. It refuses to examine the underlying substrate, at which point we’re not even talking the same language anymore when discussing consciousness.
It begs an important question: as we accelerate our output, and feel the need to keep up - how important does the “slow work” become? Reading long reports, understanding nuance, addressing the constant churn of “two steps forward one step back” (e.g. an otherwise great implementation aside from a new glaring mistake, which at a glance could be mistaken for being adversarial). As someone tasked with improving the security of my org, I perceive the unwillingness to engage with complex texts as one of the greatest threats to our industry.
The landscape is turbulent (so this comment might be outdated by the time I submit it), but one thing I’m catching between the lines is a resistance to provide defensive coding patterns because (guessing) they make the flaw they’re defending against obvious. When the flaw is widespread - those patterns effectively make it cheap to attack for observant eyes.
After seeing the enhanced capabilities recently, my conspiracy theory is that models do indeed traverse the pathways containing ideal mitigations, but they fall back to common anti-patterns when they hit the guardrails. Some of the things I’ve seen are baffling, and registered as adversarial on my radar.
Sometimes when I look at code it feels like I was led into a weird surprise party celebrating structure and correctness, only for everyone to jump out as soon as I get past the door to shout, “Just kidding - it’s the same old bullshit!” All that to say, we’re about as good or worse as anyone else, at our respective jobs.
The direct problem isn’t that people are using LLMs for everything - it’s that some people can’t be bothered to provide reasonable diligence. Phrasing that concern by blaming LLMs implies that these were perfectly diligent human workers before LLMs came along. Do we really believe that to be the case?
Assuming we have time to do this in some post-having-jobs world, of course.
While “essential” cleanly maps to “can’t go without” - it doesn’t map to “bare minimum”.
For instance, let’s assume you’re surviving in the wilderness and you need to start a fire. Your fire starting kit is obviously essential, but it could also be included in a “Camper Value Pack” - but those things don’t have anything to do with each other. The kit is essential, and it was obtained in a value pack. This message brought to you by Mr. Obvious.
> they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps
I don’t want to downplay the government pressure you cited in your second example, so I’ll start by acknowledging - that example, as stated, does indeed look like government overreach to me. It doesn’t have anything to do with what I said though.
The stance I was taking is that renaming your own “cool kids” club while you’re in a position to effectively do that - does not amount to Fascism, or anything close to it. No one else is in that club except them, and none of them will be in it later. The moniker will only stick if next group of cool kids carry it.
An important part of remaining credible (imo) is being able to support a point directly. When someone reaches for evidence that isn’t directly relevant to prove a point (e.g. Group A performed action B and it was bad, so if Group A performs action C it must be equally as bad), that’s a clear sign of a weak argument. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not trying to stick up for anyone, I’m just asking for stronger arguments.
Is it like one of those “Morning” nods, where two people cross paths and acknowledge that it is in fact morning? Or is there an unstated preference being communicated?
Is there any real concern behind LLMs writing a piece, or is the concern that the human didn’t actually guide it? In other words, is the spirit of such comments really about LLM writing, or is it about human diligence?
That begs another question: does LLM writing expose anything about the diligence of the human, outside of when it’s plainly incorrect? If an LLM generates a boringly correct report - what does that tell us about the human behind that LLM?
What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.
Forget about data centers, all the little things will iteratively start getting a little better. Then one day we’ll look around and realize, “This place looks pretty good.”
I think it’s fair to expect a question mark when the author expects other people to produce an answer.
If one desires deeper understanding, they should at least have the stamina to ask their question gracefully.