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John Philpin's avatar

Had another thought around the mediocrity thing … your poetry example is a good one. Someone who knows Yeats and good poetry would get that it is not as good as the original.

The point of ‘peak mediocrity’ is that current LLMs are good enough to be acceptable to more than half the population more than half the time (Not a high bar given our current state … but moving that aside ) and that ratio will only get better.

AND

The old measure was that AI had to ‘beat the best!. Now you only have to ‘beat the average” … and the old meaning of ‘beat’ was ‘**win**’ … good, better, best in this new world is not absolute.

‘Mediocre people’ won’t be able to tell the difference .. case in point … your Yeats example … count me in as someone who would likely be ‘hoodwinked’.

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John Philpin's avatar

Lovely to see your words flowing across the screen John. Thankyou for taking the time to write - and I am totally with you. A big takeaway from Rao's points for me is that the AI challenges used to be 'be the best' - can you win Go, can you win Chess ... etc ... Now the challenge for the AI is to be 'good enough'.

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