I have sped up a project by simply saying "What are all the possible ways I can speed up this code?" Then it'll list everything it finds, then ask it to rewrite the code.

Edit: Also, I find I didn't need to do this (because a speed up implies semantic similarity), but you can also add "change it without altering the semantics of the code" and in this way it'll be the same and should pass tests

Is it really so simple that all information in an LLM comes from the probability of each token based on the prompt? So for any prompt, there is a probability distribution to continuing (after) that prompt to generate text?

All structure of information comes from probabilities of tokens (so all structure and information processing is a side effect of token probabilities)? Or is there other stuff going on? I know reasoning models have extra stuff but let's put that aside for now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284645

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.

I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.

All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.

I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.

But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.

And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.

I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.

I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.

I'm not sure how to think about the diversity that evolution creates and how diverse it actually is. I would say there are _a lot_ of repeating patterns all across history, with variations on those repeating patterns always changing.

I also think as a sidenote there is a difference between luxury and fashion. Fashion is about creativity and self expression, and for a long time, the luxury market was sort of the defacto place for creeativity rather than the cheaper labels that had more 'standard' clothing, at least where I live. That has changed a bit in the past decade though. I like both fashion and luxury, but I am conflicted about it too. For example in the luxury fashion world there is a thing called 'grails', which are essentially items that are difficult to get but are considered very cool looking in some way and so they become grails. A lot of people like the feeling of chasing and finally acquiring grails, so that's one aspect of it.

Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.

On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.

I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information. How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.

But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.