Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven.

I have my own opinions, but I can't really say that they're not also based on anecdotes and personal decision-making heuristics.

But some of us are going to end up right and some of us are going to end up wrong and I'm really curious what features signal an ability to make "better choices" w/r/t AI, even if we don't know (or can't prove) what "better" is yet.

There is nothing wrong with sharing anecdotal experiences. Reading through anecdotal experiences here can help understand how one's own experience are relatable or not. Moreover, if I have X experience it could help to know if it is because of me doing sth wrong that others have figured out.

Furthermore, as we are talking about actual impact of LLMs, as is the point of the article, a bunch of anecdotal experiences may be more valuable than a bunch of benchmarks to figure it out. Also, apart from the right/wrong dichotomy, people use LLMs with different goals and contexts. It may not mean that some people do something wrong if they do not see the same impact as others. Everytime a web developer says that they do not understand how others may be so skeptical of LLMs, conclude with certainty that they must be doing sth wrong and move on to explain how to actually use LLMs properly, I chuckle.

Indeed, there’s nothing at all wrong with sharing anecdotes. The problem is when people make broad assumptions and conclusions based solely on personal experience, which unfortunately happens all too often. Doing so is wired into our brains, though, and we have to work very consciously to intercept our survival instincts.

I think you might be caught up in a bit of the rationalist delusion.

People -only!- draw conclusions based on personal experience. At best you have personal experience with truly objective evidence gathered in a statistically valid manner.

But that only happens in a few vanishingly rare circumstances here on earth. And wherever it happens, people are driven to subvert the evidence gathering process.

Often “working against your instincts” to be more rational only means more time spent choosing which unreliable evidence to concoct a belief from.