Agreed. I didn’t say they were useless, just that they were not going to become Lt. Cmdr Data. They’re really just freaking enormous regression models that can

Agreed. I didn’t say they were useless, just that they were not going to become Lt. Cmdr Data. They’re really just freaking enormous regression models that can in theory fit any function or set of them with enough parameters. Think of them as a kind of lossy compression but for the “meta” or function itself rather than the output. The finding that some cognitive tasks like assembling language are easier than we would intuitively think is also an interesting finding in and of itself. It shows that our brains probably don’t have to actually work that hard to assemble text, which makes some sense because we developed our language. Why would we develop a language that had crazy high overhead to synthesize?