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I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. Like you ask it to do one thing it's amazing, but then you try to modify or do

I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. Like you ask it to do one thing it's amazing, but then you try to modify or do something with extra steps, or just anything with any complexity to it and it falls over.

nerdjon 2y ago
> I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. I would like to believe that but I have had too many conversations with people who basically think it already is. Including in one situation of a fellow engineer. It feels like more and more "we" are in a bubble of actually having some knowledge of how this works, what the actual limitations are, and what it just is not. While there is in fact criticism of it out there, particularly around AI "art". It doesn't seem to be focused on the area we are talking about.
- goostavos 2y ago
  I dunno. If memes are anything to go by, people are frustrated by Yet Another Chat Bot standing between you and the human you need to solve your program. The fact that it's a better, more human like chat bot doesn't mask the frustration of being forced to talk to a computer with limited agency.
James_K 2y ago
> I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. They are being sold as such. Most people don't know anything about the topic and will buy that marketing. The entire concept of these models is that you can put a whole bunch of data in and eventually some kind of magic will happen and you get AGI out. They would not see the kind of investment that they do if all that was being promised was "really good predictive text". In fact some philosophers argue that sentience is just really good predictive text to try and make the point that these models are AGI.
kragen 2y ago
they're pretty general-purpose; you can ask the same model for recipe suggestions, a fanfic, or verilog. like, they're far, far more general-purpose than any humans i know it's true that they're not very reliable, but they seem to be not very reliable across many different domains. and they don't seem to be particularly less reliable than the average human, so i think possibly your standards for 'general purpose ai' are set high enough that you would declare humans to be unintelligent (or perhaps not 'general-purpose') if you applied them consistently you can certainly find particular domains where humans can still do things llms can't, but i haven't seen a persuasive account of why those domains are the more important ones, and of course the converse is also true
mupuff1234 2y ago
They might not think that but they sure as hell are trying to sell that idea.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Well, I believe LLMs are general purpose AI. And, for the record, so does Peter Norvig. He coauthored the most popular textbook on Artificial Intelligence, so this belief can be considered a somewhat mainstream perspective. His article, “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here“ [1] is really worth reading. https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
- lupire 2y ago
  I can't tell whether Norvig is making a subtle's point that artificial general stupidity is still an important form of artificial general intelligence, or he whether he somehow vastly overestimates AI model performance on non-memorization and summarization tasks.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    You seem to have an axe to grind. You might spend more time trying to get quality out of the models. It is possible!
solidasparagus 2y ago
The vast majority of people use a model built by someone else through a high-level abstraction and then make broad claims about what the technology will be capable of. Then you have the people who are leveraging the technology to train models from scratch and that population is far more apt to believe that large models can be general purpose AI (by some definition). Sure there are other things at play like money, publicity, reputation, and a desire to do something important. But there is also the very clear trend line where transformers are able to model pretty much any sequence of tokens where there is pretraining scale data available. Whisper was not a surprise. GPT-4v was not a surprise. Sora was not a surprise.

nerdjon 2y ago

> I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. I would like to believe that but I have had too many conversations with people who basically think it already is. Including in one situation of a fellow engineer. It feels like more and more "we" are in a bubble of actually having some knowledge of how this works, what the actual limitations are, and what it just is not. While there is in fact criticism of it out there, particularly around AI "art". It doesn't seem to be focused on the area we are talking about.

goostavos 2y ago
I dunno. If memes are anything to go by, people are frustrated by Yet Another Chat Bot standing between you and the human you need to solve your program. The fact that it's a better, more human like chat bot doesn't mask the frustration of being forced to talk to a computer with limited agency.

James_K 2y ago

> I don't think anybody who actually uses LLMs thinks they are general purpose AI. They are being sold as such. Most people don't know anything about the topic and will buy that marketing. The entire concept of these models is that you can put a whole bunch of data in and eventually some kind of magic will happen and you get AGI out. They would not see the kind of investment that they do if all that was being promised was "really good predictive text". In fact some philosophers argue that sentience is just really good predictive text to try and make the point that these models are AGI.

kragen 2y ago

they're pretty general-purpose; you can ask the same model for recipe suggestions, a fanfic, or verilog. like, they're far, far more general-purpose than any humans i know it's true that they're not very reliable, but they seem to be not very reliable across many different domains. and they don't seem to be particularly less reliable than the average human, so i think possibly your standards for 'general purpose ai' are set high enough that you would declare humans to be unintelligent (or perhaps not 'general-purpose') if you applied them consistently you can certainly find particular domains where humans can still do things llms can't, but i haven't seen a persuasive account of why those domains are the more important ones, and of course the converse is also true

mupuff1234 2y ago

They might not think that but they sure as hell are trying to sell that idea.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Well, I believe LLMs are general purpose AI. And, for the record, so does Peter Norvig. He coauthored the most popular textbook on Artificial Intelligence, so this belief can be considered a somewhat mainstream perspective. His article, “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here“ [1] is really worth reading. https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

lupire 2y ago
I can't tell whether Norvig is making a subtle's point that artificial general stupidity is still an important form of artificial general intelligence, or he whether he somehow vastly overestimates AI model performance on non-memorization and summarization tasks.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  You seem to have an axe to grind. You might spend more time trying to get quality out of the models. It is possible!

solidasparagus 2y ago

The vast majority of people use a model built by someone else through a high-level abstraction and then make broad claims about what the technology will be capable of. Then you have the people who are leveraging the technology to train models from scratch and that population is far more apt to believe that large models can be general purpose AI (by some definition). Sure there are other things at play like money, publicity, reputation, and a desire to do something important. But there is also the very clear trend line where transformers are able to model pretty much any sequence of tokens where there is pretraining scale data available. Whisper was not a surprise. GPT-4v was not a surprise. Sora was not a surprise.