Yeah sure, learning the internals of a technology that’s being actively developed will probably teach you things that remain useful for awhile even if your learning outcomes could end up being different than what he’s implying.

Whether that makes a good long-term investment is quite debatable. IMO, LeCun’s take (at the end) is far more forward-looking since it aims to gain more insight into what could come next based on what we know about the current state of the art.

All that being said, the extent to which these people capitalize on our tendency to be blinded by the halo effect is incredible. A constant stream of bite-sized aphorisms…

This is especially at a different level for early startup figures who happened to be in the right place at the right time and usually did little more than digitizing mundane, traditional day-to-day processes. Yet they’re treated as geniuses and prophets, with people hanging on their every word as though everything they say contains some deeper wisdom. PG and the like often strike me as broken clocks and they’re still profiting from having been very early players in the game, who had good instincts for commercialization and capitalism.

————

LeCun’s reply:

> I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom. Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem. I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical tasks as efficiently as humans and animals. That last item is also what I would if I were 30, 40, 50, or 66 years old

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.

It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.

“Talk is cheap, show me the prompt” is my go to request for dealing with people’s AI generated responses. Voice and tone varies, of course, depending on the recipient.

It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.

That response is freaking ridiculous and does nothing but proving the very point of the issue.

Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”

Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).

Very accurate (at least wrt my experience) yet so sad. It’s unfathomable how we ended up being maneuvered into accepting this as an “upgrade” to how we practice our profession, build things, solve problems.

For many reasons, it doesn’t feel sane and humane to impose this way of working on employees without their consent.

The tech space has always had some cult-like, belief-driven practices, but I think we used to have more diversity in terms of working cultures and conventions, which made it easier to find an option that better fit your values and way of thinking. Things are becoming very uniform, at a pace that could compete with dystopian fiction, where all of us are coerced into gathering around an “absolute” truth or at least operating according to one.

this is great! i can’t wait to give it a shot.

i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online. i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.

I had this exact experience! Bettermouse has been fine, but the mouse speed seems to be vary wildly across different applications for some reason.

I am glad to get off of logi options though. Even before it finally stopped working altogether, it would frequently just stop working and my mouse settings would revert to default behavior.

> Anthropomorphizing these models is doing immeasurable harm to society in ways we probably can’t event quantify right now

This is one of my biggest concerns about AI’s social impact. On top of that, models are positioned as superior to humans, at least in certain aspects (intelligence, knowledge) by AI companies’ PR campaigns, fear-mongering, and also by the changing tone of LLMs (e.g. Opus 5 sounds like a very patronizing, know-it-all, cynical person). I am afraid this is causing a shift in how humanity perceives itself and the way they relate to this technology, so AI might stop being a tool/technology and turn into a mythical, god-like superior being.

Yes! I had exactly the same experience. Quitting habits like smoking, drinking coffee, or playing video games has always been much easier during those periods, and it felt like it happened on its own. It was mind-blowing to notice that after it happened a couple of times.