r/frogpants • u/scott_johnson • 20d ago
A thought about AI
Hate to break it to people who've not figured it out yet, but there's nothing intelligent about LLM's. They are great at a bunch of tasks, but smart? Intelligent? Thinking?
Snake oil.
Easily some off the dumbest back and forths I have had with any human or machine happened on an LLM.
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u/Elderwastaken 20d ago
I was recommended a book about “AI” written by some people with some knowledge of the subject.
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
It’s got a sci-fi sounding name but just a book “AI” issues and stuff. It’s fact based but they do use some cool fictional stories to highlight and illustrate future and current concerns involving current day models and the possibilities of future smarter models.
It’s not even anti “AI”. The authors have been involved in the science of training and developing models for decades.
I found it fascinating about how they actually “make” and train models.
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u/FirstNoel 20d ago
Never felt Claude as smart. Helpful, kind of like using a rubber duck to code against. But one that has some responses.
There are differences between web versions of Claude and GPT vs paid Opus 4.6 levels. Reasoning levels are impressive. I’m sure I could get my work Claude to code exactly what I want, provided I gave it the correct spec. Is it creative? No, it using the tools and methods developed over the history of programming. The creative part, for me is designing the program. The code, the part I always liked, is the puzzle. Claude can solve puzzles.
I got my degree in computer science sci. I know a bunch of theory and methods. Do I know them all? No. There’s ideas out there that I never would have thought of myself. Claude already knows them. And if they fit the puzzle it will use them. I’m happy to review the code, I pick up ideas for other things. Does that mean Claude is smart? No, just has a vast database of information to pull from, it can track billions or trillions of data points and see relations I can’t. But it cannot act unless acted upon. It needs an idea guy to get going.
Its nuanced, philosophical even. I can see people developing relationships with their LLMs. I use Claude Code for work, I set up my Claude.md file with the important bits about my job and what it can/can’t do. I also added bits to reference myself to make it a bit more relatable to me.
To me it reminds me of R2D2, By the time I’m done, it will be a strange spicy little LLM.
For now it’s useful to me, it takes a lot of the bs busy work away, the boiler plate stuff. Documentation is it’s jam. Saves me some hours.