We can empirically figure out how often the reasoning model is correct. With a 95% empirical accuracy, it should still help the model directionally. No training data set needs to be 100% accurate. No?
> We're already using domain-specific LLM's. The only LLM trained lawfully that I know of, KL3M, is also domain-specific. So, the title is already wrong.
This looks like an "ethical" LLM but not domain specific. What is the domain here?
> That's why domain-specific models are usually general models converted to domain-specific models by continued pretraining
I've also wondered this, like with the case of the Codex model. My hunch is that a good general model trumps a pretrained model by just adding an appropriate system prompt. Which is why even OpenAI sorta recommends using GPT-5.4 over any Codex model.
> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.
The author is a bit naive here:
1. Society only progresses when people are specialised and can delegate their thinking
2. Specialisation has been happening for millenia. Agriculture allowed people to become specialised due to abundance of food
3. We accept delegation of thinking in every part of life. A manager delegates thinking to their subordinates. I delegate some thinking to my accountant
4. People will eventually get the hang of using AI to do the optimum amount of delegation such that they still retain what is necessary and delegate what is not necessary. People who don't do this optimally will get outcompeted
The author just focuses on some local problems like skill atrophy but does not see the larger picture and how specific pattern has been repeating a lot in humanity's history.
The post was written by Claude. The semicolon in the Dune quote proves it: the only possible reason for that to be there is if the 'author' regex replaced all of the em dashes to obfuscate the source. https://boxobarks.leaflet.pub/3misaejnoqs2k
> It is a profoundly erroneous truism ... that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Current civilization is very complex. And it’s also fragile in some parts. When you build systems around instant communication and the availability of stuff built in the other side of the world on a fixed schedule, it’s very easy to disrupt.
> 4. People will eventually get the hang of using AI to do the optimum amount of delegation such that they still retain what is necessary and delegate what is not necessary. People who don't do this optimally will get outcompeted
Then they’ll be at the mercy of the online service availability and the company themselves. Also there’s the non deterministic result. I can delegate my understanding of some problems to a library, a software, a framework, because their operation are deterministic. Not so with LLMs.
I have been able to produce 20x the amount of useful outputs both in my day job and in my free time using a popular coding agent in 2026. Part of me is uncomfortable at having from some perspective my hard won knowledge of how to write English, code and to design systems partly commoditized. Part of me is amazed and grateful for being in this timeline. I am now learning and building things I only dreamed about for years. Sky is the limit.
1. outsourcing and offshoring (non deterministic, easy to disrupt)
2. cloud computing (mercy of the online service availability)
we had the same dilemma.
Outsource exactly what you think is not critical to the business. Offshore enough so that you gain good talent across the globe. Use cloud computing so that your company does not spend time working on solving problems that have already been solved. Assess what skills are required and what aren't - an e-commerce company doesn't need deep expertise in linux and postgres.
Companies that do this well outcompete other companies that obsess over details that are not core to their value proposition. This is how modern startups work: it is in finding that critical balance of buying products externally vs building only the crucial skills internally.
I think you missed the point. The entire article is about specialists: astrophysicists. The problem with AI is that specialists are delegating their thinking about their specialty! The fear here is that society will stop producing specialists, and thus society will no longer progress.
You are assuming that set of specialists are fixed system! That's not the case. With change in technology, you would get more and more specialists, the same way Agricultural revolution allowed for more specialists to exist.
The author describes specifically how specialists are produced and how AI undermines their production.
No, we won't get more and more specialists literally "the same way" as the agricultural revolution. You need to be much more specific about how we'll get more specialists under the incentive structure created by AI, otherwise this sounds like some kind of religious faith in AI and progress.
> I can't tell what specialists we will get the same way you wouldn't be able to tell me we will have Linux Kernel specialists at the year 1945.
How about addressing astrophysics specifically. What are you claiming about it? Are you claiming that in the future, we won't need astrophysicists at all, AI can do all of our astrophysics for us, freeing humans to specialize in... other subjects?
And doesn't the same problem exist for Linux kernel specialists? Why even become a Linux kernel specialists when AI can write your source code for you?
> people become specialists
This is precisely what is in question.
> A mathematician in 1500's wouldn't think algebraic topology would be a specialisation.
The specific subjects have changed over time, but the production of specialist mathematicians hasn't really changed. It takes hard work, grunt work, struggling, making mistakes and learning from them, as well as expert supervision. The problem with AI is that it encourages and incentivizes intellectual laziness, the opposite of what is required to produce specialists.
A related problem: LLMs have been trained with papers written and supervised by Alice-type specialists. There's a common claim that LLMs will hallucinate less in the future, but I think that LLMs will hallucinate more in the future, when specialty fields become dominated by Bob-type "specialists" who have a harder time distinguishing fact from fiction. When LLMs have to train on material produced by earlier versions of LLMs, the quality trend will go down, not up.
> The specific subjects have changed over time, but the production of specialist mathematicians hasn't really changed. It takes hard work, grunt work, struggling, making mistakes and learning from them, as well as expert supervision. The problem with AI is that it encourages and incentivizes intellectual laziness, the opposite of what is required to produce specialists
Let's take the example of economics. Economists use ideas in Mathematics like integrals, statistics, PDE's and so on. They know that these concepts exist. They know how to apply them. They don't know these concepts deep enough to make progress here.
Do you think that Economists should deeply learn integrals, PDE's, Functional Analysis and Differential Geometry and all other concepts they use? Or do you think its better for them to focus just on their specific domain while learning just enough from other domains?
You keep coming back to AI replacing mathematicians. I'm not making that claim. I'm not saying Linux kernel specialists will be replaced by AI. I'm simply claiming that not everyone needs to be Linux Kernel specialists. This is precisely what AI is allowing: it automates things I don't need to know deeply so that I can focus on things I do need to understand deeply.
> I'm simply claiming that not everyone needs to be Linux Kernel specialists.
This is an uninteresting and indeed silly claim, because nobody has ever asserted the opposite.
The point is that society needs some Linux kernel specialists, and some astrophysicists, but AI is undermining their production.
> This is precisely what AI is allowing: it automates things I don't need to know deeply so that I can focus on things I do need to understand deeply.
The submitted article is about how AI is automating the things that a specialist does need to understand deeply. It's about so-called astrophysicists using AI to produce astrophysics papers, not about how non-astrophysicists use AI to produce astrophysics papers so that they can focus on whatever their non-astrophysics specialty may be, if they have any specialty.
> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.
If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement. Not all the things a researcher works on while writing their paper is useful or necessarily done by them manually. In such cases it becomes necessary to let LLM take over.
> > Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe
The article author and I share a love of Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune, and the quote in question. Nonetheless, it's a mistake to focus on this quote rather than on the rest of the article. The quote is nothing more than a nice literary reference; it's not central to the argument.
The character who spoke the quote is a magically prescient human-sandworm hybrid, thousands of years old, speaking to his distant relative who was specially bred by him to be invisible to the magical prescience, so let's take the quote with a grain of... sand. ;-)
> If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement.
Your parenthetical remark is actually the main problem!
Look I'm sure it'll happen in some places, it's just not going to be a major shift in the way this post describes.
If the table stakes for using my API is a local GPU to build the interface, my competitors who used their GPUs once to create the interface for their customers will win. If the API getting started guide involves going to a user-contributed list of prompts to put together a set of things I want in the interface, the competitor who doesn't have that step and provides a default interface will win.
Default interfaces being provided is not going to change, and the universal truth of defaults is that most people stick with them.
Power users modifying their interfaces has always been a thing and is easier with LLMs, but it's going to remain niche, as in, something that power users/hobbyists do, or companies might provide their own internal UI to some external API, but again that already happens extensively.
Amazon is the wrong analogy I think, because delivery is in some ways cheaper than every individual going to the store themselves, storing in warehouses is cheaper than storing in stores. In fact in some ways the Amazon analogy better fits the other way around. Not a perfect fit.
For anyone interested in this, log on to claude.ai and ask it to teach you something using "your generative UI elements" and watch it work. I do think this is the future in some ways although this specific feature in claude will eat up your tokens so beware.
> I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS
I think HN reflexively shoots down any idea or prediction with a bias to the incumbent.
Generally, a technological advancement will render some previous ways of working useless or outdated. People value convenience way more than a curated experience but I'm not disagreeing that brand differentiation would still exist.
A company that offers a meaningfully better experience in the long term will outcompete a company that focuses too much on aesthetics.
If they get generative UI right, where the UI provider can also give their own flavour and have some differentiation but also allow enough personalisation to afford the user better experience, it will happen.
Some bets don't work (like RSS) but some bets have worked - like the Amazon e-commerce model. A person in 1985 could have shut Amazon's idea down the same way you have.
Convenience is often curated experience. That is apart what was already there when humans emerged (which is of course still the biggest part), everything human experience was curated by previous humans. But of course even curated crafts get thrown and replace with other different experiences.
> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.
The author is a bit naive here:
1. Society only progresses when people are specialised and can delegate their thinking
2. Specialisation has been happening for millenia. Agriculture allowed people to become specialised due to abundance of food
3. We accept delegation of thinking in every part of life. A manager delegates thinking to their subordinates. I delegate some thinking to my accountant
4. People will eventually get the hang of using AI to do the optimum amount of delegation such that they still retain what is necessary and delegate what is not necessary. People who don't do this optimally will get outcompeted
The author just focuses on some local problems like skill atrophy but does not see the larger picture and how specific pattern has been repeating a lot in humanity's history.
I see this happening in modern day politics when it comes to critiquing tech.
For instance, consider AI data centres in space: look, everyone knows its a high risk bet. If you do the easy thing of shooting it down, you may "win" the bet often enough. But try to understand that the world works by taking bold bets - each thing you see is a bold bet, not coming from a planned economy. I see my own laptop - the processor, the internet, the screen - everything was a bold bet at one point.
Shooting down ideas is easy and temporarily confers high status on you (since you win the bet more often than not) but in the long run such a game will show itself as ridiculous.
Heh, I'm usually on the ideas "side", but since I've publicly shot down the data centers in space idea, the shoe is on the other foot.
I'll just say that if there are some obvious enormous drawbacks to an idea, then you are responsible for mentioning your counter to them when presenting an idea. "Do X by seemingly breaking the laws of physics" had better be accompanied with at least some mention of how you are not, in fact, breaking the laws of physics.
There are two sides, the one presenting an idea and the one receiving it, and both have responsibilities. The article is about one way that one side often fails to maintain one of its responsibilities. No more than that.
Maybe people on the internet like to slag off anyone rich and famous? The only one there seems evidence for is him being less than candid with the board.
Only evidence? What evidence do you think normally is present from a sexual assault of a child years before?
I would suggest that his support of an adjudicated rapist and accused pedophile who is covering up for a child sex trafficking ring operated by another pedophile that Altman had a known documented relationship with...is a pretty good indicator of his guilt.
Altmans lawyers argued this week that because the alleged abuse happened so long ago the case should be thrown out. They didn't say because Altman is innocent,they said bc it occurred years ago.
Annie Altman is asking for $75,000...that's it.
You can read text messages from Sam Altman refusing to give her $45 for therapy bills.
Altman is described as former associates as a sociopath who is devoid of any morals and lies to attain his desires.
He is suspected of having a former business partner killed.
I don't know how anyone can think his sister would make this up. She was a pre-med student at Tufts. Anybody who suffers sexual abuse from a sibling is going to have ptsd and other emotional & mental health issues.
He is well known to be morally troubled— his postings here over the years gave off that vibe for most who paid attention— but even if he were a hypersexual psychopath or something like that, it doesn’t prove he molested his little sister all those times. There’s a lot of grey area in childhood sexuality, and Sam seems like a “grey area” sort of guy fwiw. He is probably mostly innocent.
It’s he said she said. And in this case we’re being asked to believe the very wealthy and powerful older brother over a younger sister who has to rely on “the family” for money and who “the family” claims is “mentally unwell”.
Why is that hard for you to believe? Do you think having wealth or success eliminates you from sexually assaulting others??? I'm sorry have you read the Epstein files??
Our current president is an adjudicated Rapist found guilty of raping a woman by a jury. 25 women have come forward and publicly accused him of sexual assault. Let me guess you think he is innocent as well? 3 of his cabinet members have sexual assault/pedophilia claims against them.
Do you know what the percentage of rape claims being false is? Less than 6%...and thats the high ceiling,the actual percentage is 3%.
Do you have any idea the damage being sexually abused causes? Especially by a sibling? It's a lifetime sentence of trauma.
Annie Altman was a pre-med student at Tufts.
You can read text messages where she asks for $45 to pay a therapy bill and Sam tells her no,you'll just have to work harder or figure it out.
When her father passed in 2018 her mother and brothers hid the will from her bc her father left his 401k to her. A year later a lawyer contacted her to tell her about the inheritance. But then her brother Sam hired his mother a lawyer to file a challenge to the 401k. Even though Mr.Altman had been separated for over a decade from his wife,she never signed the divorce papers do thru a law for surviving spouses she has filed to claim the 401k.
Sam Altman has been described by numerous associates as a sociopath who is morally bankrupt. He is a habitual liar who constantly pitted employees against eachother. He forced workers to sign ndas stating they were not allowed to say anything critical of OpenAi or him.
He was a huge donor to the pedophile in the White House and continues to give him money and support him.People who abuse and assault keep company with those who do as well.
Your comment is EXACTLY the type of victim blaming that got us where we are.
> Altman’s ouster, which is effective immediately, follows “a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the board said in a blog post Friday.
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