But I've noticed that a lot of people think of LLM's as being _good_ at predicting the future and that's what I find concerning.
(I'll make my prediction: 10 years from now, most things will be more similar to what things are today than most people expected them to be)
And the answer is no.
If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.
I agree it's a bit silly, but I think it understood the assignment(TM) which was to kind of do a winking performative show and dance to the satisfaction of the user interacting with it. It's entertainment value rather than sincere prediction. Every single entry is showing off a "look how futury this is" headline.
Actual HN would have plenty of posts lateral from any future signalling. Today's front page has Oliver Sacks, retrospectives on Warcraft II, opinion pieces on boutique topics. They aren't all "look at how future-y the future is" posts. I wonder if media literacy is the right word for understanding when an LLM is playing to its audience rather than sincerely imitating or predicting.
> Google kills Gemini Cloud Services
> Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM
> Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
> Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI
It did ok, then I kept asking for "Now, the 1990s?" and kept going into future decades. "Now, the 2050s?" It made some fun extrapolations.
Technically the article was about running it not on a sat, but on a dish (something well within the realm of possibility this year if the router firmware on the darn things could be modified at all)
Those predictions were what I think of as a reflection of current reality more than any kind of advanced reasoning about the future.
Well said. There's precious little of that in the human writings that we gave it.