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3337 points keepamovin | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.399s | source
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iambateman ◴[] No.46207321[source]
This was a fun little lark. Great idea!

It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future. It’s very good at predicting the next token but maybe even worse than humans—who are already terrible—at making educated guesses about the state of the world in a decade.

I asked Claude: “Think ten years into the future about the state of software development. What is the most likely scenario?” And the answer it gave me was the correct answer for today and definitely not a decade into the future.

This is why it’s so dangerous to ask an LLM for personal advice of any kind. It isn’t trained to consider second-order effects.

Thanks for the thought experiment!

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glenstein ◴[] No.46207493[source]
>It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future.

I agree it's a bit silly, but I think it understood the assignment(TM) which was to kind of do a winking performative show and dance to the satisfaction of the user interacting with it. It's entertainment value rather than sincere prediction. Every single entry is showing off a "look how futury this is" headline.

Actual HN would have plenty of posts lateral from any future signalling. Today's front page has Oliver Sacks, retrospectives on Warcraft II, opinion pieces on boutique topics. They aren't all "look at how future-y the future is" posts. I wonder if media literacy is the right word for understanding when an LLM is playing to its audience rather than sincerely imitating or predicting.

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1. jetrink ◴[] No.46207811[source]
Also, many of the posts seemed intended to be humorous and satirical, rather than merely 'futury.' They made me laugh anyway.

> Google kills Gemini Cloud Services

> Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM

> Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?

> Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI

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2. kminehart ◴[] No.46216294[source]
I walked away with that page open, glanced at the "Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" post, and clicked to see the comments because I thought it was real :')