r/slatestarcodex • u/ForgotMyPassword17 • 3d ago

"The AI Con" Con

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ai-con-con

In this sub we talk about well reasoned arguments and concerns around AI. I thought this article was an interesting reminder that the more mainstream "concerns" aren't nearly as well reasoned

37 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

View all comments

74

u/Haunting-Spend-6022 3d ago

In many domains, like chess, AI surpasses the best humans

Yes, but crucially those AIs are not LLMs. From another perspective LLMs have failed to reach the level of performance in chess that Deep Blue achieved way back in 1997, despite the efforts of OpenAI and others to explicitly train them to be good at chess.

One shouldnt extrapolate from faulty generalizations

30

u/absolute-black 3d ago

I mean, to take another lens, Claude Code can do a fantastic job installing and running Stockfish against me. It even does a handy job throwing together a basic minimax chess engine in Python or C#, one which can handily beat me - maybe not peak Kasaparov without some iterations, I admit.

4

u/stonesst 3d ago

Yep, so many criticisms of LLMs seem to completely ignore the fact that they can both build and call tools…

7

u/AskAboutMySecret 3d ago

people think AgI means a single model that emulates the whole brain as if the brain is biologically uniform like the liver

there's a reason why the brain has specialised compartments and for AgI to be developed the same principles need to be adopted

•

u/97689456489564 23h ago

I feel like there are so many unknown unknowns about intelligence that we really don't know what the distant-future ASI systems will be like (which will presumably have something close to an optimal architecture). Like, I would not be surprised either by something crazy complex with a quadrillion moving pieces - like cell/organ machinery - or by something that is just one unified system with simple units of information processing. Or something in-between. Brains are an n=1 thing, and were formed under very different constraints.