“Someone, I think Bertrand Russell, said we compare the mind to whatever is the most complex machine we know. Clocks, steam engines, telephone relays, digital c

“Someone, I think Bertrand Russell, said we compare the mind to whatever is the most complex machine we know. Clocks, steam engines, telephone relays, digital computers. For AI, it’s the opposite: as capabilities increase, and our understanding of AI systems decreases, the analogies become more and more dismissive. … Machines you can use for free today pass the Turing test, these are called ‘stochastic parrots’, which is dismissive, but at least parrots are living things that engage in goal-directed activity. Every single day machines do something that if you were told of it not one year ago you would have called it witchcraft, but LLMs are ‘blurry JPEGs’. Yesterday I heard ‘Markov chain on steroids’. When the first computer wakes up we’ll call it a pile of sed scripts. …” https://borretti.me/article/and-yet-it-understands https://borretti.me/article/and-yet-it-understands