Why the Hacker News community is still running "AI is the second coming of Jesus", "AI is and will always be a mere party trick" (and company) threads is beyond me. LLMs are, at some level, conceptually simple: they take training data that is sorta like a language and become an oracle for it. Everyone keeps saying the Statue of Liberty is copper-green, so it answers similarly when asked as much. Maybe it gets a question about the Statue of Liberty's original color, putting a bit more pressure on it to get the right data now that there is modality, but still really easy in practice. It imitates intelligence based on its training data. This is not a moral evaluation but purely factual. If you believe creativity can come from unoriginal ideas meshed or stretched originally, as it seems humans generally do, then the LLM is creative too. If humans have some external spark, perhaps LLMs don't. But that's all speculation and opinion. Since humans have produced all the training data, an LLM is basically a superhuman that really likes following directions. An LLM, as is anything we create, a glorified mirror for ourselves. It's easy to have an emotionally charged, normative, one-dimensional take on the LLM landscape, certainly when that's what everyone else is doing too. Hype in any direction is a distraction; look for the unadulterated truth, account for probabilistic change, and decide which path to take. Try to understand varied perspectives without being hasty. Be gracious. I know that YC is a place for VC money, and also that people are weird about stuff they either created or didn't create.<p>"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."<p>- Max Planck (commonly told as "science advances one funeral at a time")<p>We should collectively try to not force the last resort to accept change and instead go along with the flow. If you ever think your view is on top of things, there's a good chance you're still missing a lot. So don't grandstand or moralize (certainly, I would never! ha ha...). Be respectful of others' time, experiences, and intelligence.