I imagine his opinions might have changed by now. If we're still residing in 2023, I would be inclined to agree with him. Today, in 2025 however, LLMs are just another tool being used to "reduce labor costs" and extract more profit from the humans left who have money. There will be no scientific developments if things continue in this manner.
Readit Newsr00sty commented on Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023) chomsky.info/20230503-2/... · Posted by u/mef
r00sty commented on Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs? · Posted by u/bjackman
I always spend more time fighting the bot and having to debug the code it gives for anything it gives to be useful.
These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible.
The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and not just treating it like a magic button that solves all problems without fine-tuning.
To give you a few examples:
- There is something called the Picture Superiority Effect, which states that humans remember images better than merely words. I have been interested in applying this to language learning – imagine a unique image for each word you’re learning in German, for example. A few years ago I was about to hire an illustrator to make these images for me, but now with Midjourney or other image creators, I can functionally make unlimited unique images for $30 a month. This is a massive new development that wasn’t possible before.
- I have been working on a list of AI tools that would be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing. Things like: analyze the assumptions in this piece; find related concepts with genealogical links; check if this idea is original or not; rephrase this argument as a series of Socratic dialogues. And so on. This kind of thing has been immensely helpful in evaluating my own personal essays and ideas, and prior to AI tools it, again, was not really possible unless I hired someone to critique my work.
The key for both of these example use cases is that I have absolutely no expectation of perfection. I don’t expect the AI images or text to be free of errors. The point is to use them as messy, creative tools that open up possibilities and unconsidered angles, not to do all the work for you.
In a more perfect world where we were just discussing the merits of the tech, I would be more inclined to agree. But I have to impress that the entire point of the tech is to do everything.
AI receives so much funding and support from the wealthy because they believe that they can use it to replace humans and reduce labor costs. I strongly suspect that AI being available to us at all is merely a plot to get us to train and troubleshoot the tech for them so it can more perfectly imitate us. Then, eventually, when the tech is "good enough" it will rapidly become too expensive for normal people to use and thus become inaccessible.
Companies are already mass-firing their staff in favor of AI agents even though those agents don't even do a good job. Imagine how it will be when they do.
r00sty commented on What I discovered after months of professional use of custom GPTs · Posted by u/anammana
This is good info. Too many products have hyperbolic promises but ultimately fail operationally in the real world because they are simply lacking.
It is important that this be repeated ad nauseum with AI since it seems there are so many "true believers" who are willing to distort that material reality of AI products.
At this point, I am not convinced that it can ever "get better". These problems seem inherent and fundamental with the technology and while they could possibly be mitigated to an acceptable level, we really should not do that because we can just use traditional algorithms then that are far easier on compute and the environment. And far more reliable. There really isn't any advantage or benefit.
I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me.
And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly? This is the most amazing technology I've experienced as a 50+ year old nerd that has been sitting deep in tech for basically my whole life. This is the stuff of science fiction, and while there totally are limitations, the speed at which it is progressing is insane. And people are like, "Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience!"
Crazy.
I mean. How would you feel if you coded a menu in Python with certain choices but when you used it the choices were never the same or in the same order, sometimes there were fake choices, sometimes they are improperly labelled and sometimes the menu just completely fails to open. And you as a coder and you as a user have absolutely no control over any of those issues. Then, when you go online to complain people say useful stuff like "Isn't it amazing that it does anything at all!? Give us a break, we're working on it bro."
That's how I see LLMs and the hype surrounding them.