I think AI is neat.
I think LLMs are neat, and Teslas are neat, and HHO generators are neat, and aliens are neat…
…but none of them live up to all of the claims made about them.
I feel like our current “AIs” are like the Virtual Intelligences in Mass Effect. They can perform some tasks and hold a conversation, but they aren’t actually “aware”. We’re still far off from a true AI like the Geth or EDI.
I wish we called them VI’s. It was a good distinction in their ability.
Though honestly I think our AI is more advanced in conversation than a VI in ME.
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well and VI is such an apt term too. But since we live in the shittiest timeline Electronic Arts would probably have taken the Blizzard/Nintendo route too and patented the term.
If an LLM is just regurgitating information in a learned pattern and therefore it isn’t real intelligence, I have really bad news for ~80% of people.
Keep seething, OpenAI’s LLMs will never achieve AGI that will replace people
That was never the goal… You might as well say that a bowling ball will never be effectively used to play golf.
Buddy, nobody ever said it would
Keep seething
Keep projecting
Ok, but so do most humans? So few people actually have true understanding in topics. They parrot the parroting that they have been told throughout their lives. This only gets worse as you move into more technical topics. Ask someone why it is cold in winter and you will be lucky if they say it is because the days are shorter than in summer. That is the most rudimentary “correct” way to answer that question and it is still an incorrect parroting of something they have been told.
Ask yourself, what do you actually understand? How many topics could you be asked “why?” on repeatedly and actually be able to answer more than 4 or 5 times. I know I have a few. I also know what I am not able to do that with.
I don’t think actual parroting is the problem. The problem is they don’t understand a word outside of how it is organized. They can’t be told to do simple logic because they don’t have a simple understanding of each word in their vocabulary. They can only reorganize things to varying degrees.
It doesn’t need to understand the words to perform logic because the logic was already performed by humans who encoded their knowledge into words. It’s not reasoning, but the reasoning was already done by humans. It’s not perfect of course since it’s still based on probability, but the fact that it can pull the correct sequence of words to exhibit logic is incredibly powerful. The main hard part of working with LLMs is that they break randomly, so harnessing their power will be a matter of programming in multiple levels of safe guards.
Few people truly understand what understanding means at all, i got teacher in college that seriously thinked that you should not understand content of lessons but simply remember it to the letter
I am so glad I had one that was the opposite. I discussed practical applications of the subject material after class with him and at the end of the semester he gave me a B+ even though I only got a C by score because I actually grasped the material better than anyone else in the class, even if I was not able to evaluate it as well on the tests.
I’m glad for you) out teacher liked to offer discussion only to shoot us down when we tried to understand something, i was like duh that’s what teachers are for, to help us understand, if teachers don’t do that, then it’s the same as watching YouTube lectures
This is only one type of intelligence and LLMs are already better at humans at regurgitating facts. But I think people really underestimate how smart the average human is. We are incredible problem solvers, and AI can’t even match us in something as simple as driving a car.
Lol @ driving a car being simple. That is one of the more complex sensory somatic tasks that humans do. You have to calculate the rate of all vehicles in front of you, assess for collision probabilities, monitor for non-vehicle obstructions (like people, animals, etc.), adjust the accelerator to maintain your own velocity while terrain changes, be alert to any functional changes in your vehicle and be ready to adapt to them, maintain a running inventory of laws which apply to you at the given time and be sure to follow them. Hell, that is not even an exhaustive list for a sunny day under the best conditions. Driving is fucking complicated. We have all just formed strong and deeply connected pathways in our somatosensory and motor cortexes to automate most of the tasks. You might say it is a very well-trained neural network with hundreds to thousands of hours spent refining and perfecting the responses.
The issue that AI has right now is that we are only running 1 to 3 sub-AIs to optimize and calculate results. Once that number goes up, they will be capable of a lot more. For instance: one AI for finding similarities, one for categorizing them, one for mapping them into a use case hierarchy to determine when certain use cases apply, one to analyze structure, one to apply human kineodynamics to the structure and a final one to analyze for effectiveness of the kineodynamic use cases when done by a human. This would be a structure that could be presented an object and told that humans use it and the AI brain could be able to piece together possible uses for the tool and describe them back to the presenter with instructions on how to do so.
Jokes on them. I don’t even calculate when I need to parrot. I am beyond such lowly needs.
You’ve just described most people…
P-Zombies, all of them. I happen to be the only one to actually exist. What are the odds, right? But it’s true.
It figures you’d say it, it’s probably your algorithm trying to mess up with my mind!
LLMs are a step towards AI in the same sense that a big ladder is a step towards the moon.
I fully back your sentiment OP; you understand as much about the world as any LLM out there and don’t let anyone suggest otherwise.
Signed, a “contrarian”.
Unfortunately the majority of people are idiots who just do this in real life, parroting populous ideology without understanding anything more than the proper catchphrase du jour. And there are many employed professionals who are paid to read a script, or output mundane marketing content, or any “content”. And for that, LLMs are great.
It’s the elevator operator of technology as applied to creative writers. Instead of “hey intern, write the next article about 25 things these idiots need to buy and make sure 90% of them are from our sponsors” it goes to AI. The writer was never going to purchase a few different types of each product category, blindly test them and write a real article. They are just shilling crap they are paid to shill making it look “organic” because many humans are too stupid to not know it’s a giant paid for ad.
As someone who has loves Asimov and read nearly all of his work.
I absolutely bloody hate calling LLM’s AI, without a doubt they are neat. But they are absolutely nothing in the ballpark of AI, and that’s okay! They weren’t trying to make a synethic brain, it’s just the culture narrative I am most annoyed at.
I’ve know people in my life who put less mental effort into living their lives than LLMs put into crafting the most convincing lies you’ve ever read
So… LLMS are… teenagers?
Is that Summer from Rick and Morty?
Alternatively we could call things what they are. You know, cause if we ever have actual AI we kind of need the term to be intact and not watered down by years of marketing bullshit or whatever else.
How do you know for sure your brain is not doing exactly the same thing? Hell, being autistic, many social interactions are just me trying to guess what will get me approval without any understanding lol.
Also really fitting that Photon chose this for a placeholder right now:
