Technology

I don't know about a "revolt", but it sure is disappointing.

I like the guy, and most of what he does. I also like, contrary to some, that he usually keep quiet on some controversial topics. Well, I liked that; it seems that he wasn't just "staying quiet", unfortunately.

And, the worst part is just that he, as we know him (remember, parasocial stuff and so on), should have been on the side of people that "know better". I don't understand how you can be that curious of a person, and not seeing the issues here. I understand trying the tools, to see what it's about and what it can actually do; in a sort of experimentation kind of way. I would even understand (but not condone) regularly using them in some ways, once you find something that you can confidently say "it works well enough".

This, however, is not it. And maybe I'm putting him on a sort of pedestal when I say he should have known better, but that's how I feel it. There's a large list of things LLM are known to not be reliable for: searching anything beyond surface informations, properly summarizing actually complex subjects, picking out what's pertinent and what isn't, being consistent, not having blind side, and being truthful (assuming we can decide what truthful means in the first place). All of this is intrinsic to the technology at hand. And while some people argument that "humans are imperfect too", the difference is that humans can spot their mistakes.

And yet, here we are; one of the most prominent science communicator, heavily leaning on this to start his researches, undoubtedly being led astray on some topics by hallucination, missing some big issues on others because the models simply didn't get something out this time (for whatever reasons), getting very heavy confirmation bias (because of course at some point you ask a prompt that's oriented, and the LLM will oblige). And recently, a few things he kept saying, like, we're needing more code… sounded silly. In fact, most of the time I hear something in a field I'm reasonably knowledgeable about, I find things that I don't really agree with.

That's the part that worries me about this. Not that he used large, corporate LLMs "responsibly" (assuming that's a thing one can do, which I'm not convinced of). But that he muddled the image of a reliable source (and we have to decide, at some point, that this or that source is reliable or not) with lots of approximations wrapped in a pretty ribbon. And now, the little things I was slightly weirded out in his videos are taking way more space in my mind, and I'm starting to doubt topics I'm absolutely not knowledgeable about that he's talked about, too, because that's just how trust works.

At the end of the day, reliable people come and goes, but the "disclosure" sure sounded like he didn't actually grasp the issues, only barely that there might have been issues.