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If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. At the same time though they are already doing way mo

If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. At the same time though they are already doing way more than we thought they could. Maybe people were surprised by what OpenAI achieved so now they are all just praying that with enough compute and the right model AGI will emerge.

more_corn 2y ago
LLMs are the language center of an AI. They in no way purport to be: long term memory, critical thinking engines, calculators. If we want those things we can build them. Building them into the language center would be absurd and weird.
- daveguy 2y ago
  This is a very good take on the current state of LLMs. They are able to articulate surprisingly well and LLMs or something similar will definitely be part of a larger AI model in the future. They are good creative aids, but they should not be trusted.
- viking123 2y ago
  In the brain all those things are neural networks too, memory is encoded in the weights. So if we want to have that type of system, everyone should have their own model and the weights would actually adjust all the time just like in our brain, but now it is just trained once and that is that
- lupire 2y ago
  And yet this is what all the big companies we re trying to do, because the LLM is incredibly expensive fixed cost, and they marginal cost for each new task.
solidasparagus 2y ago
> If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generator. Explain to me how humans are fundamentally different
- throwanem 2y ago
  "Prove me wrong?" That's not how this works. Your implicit claim here is that human cognition and LLM functioning are fundamentally similar. That claim requires substantiation.
  - solidasparagus 2y ago
    It is how it works if you are replying to someone who claims "If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI". The counter example is human beings are considered general purpose intelligence and we are complex, but fundamentally predictable systems (not by us today), with (as far as we can tell) deterministic outputs based on the state of the universe (including physical being like brain and chemicals).
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Responding to an unsubstantiated claim with an unsubstantiated claim just adds another unsubstantiated claim. So far as I know, whether the universe behaves deterministically remains an unsolved question. Given that, your statement here would already be one of belief rather than fact, even before we get to the parentheticals. There is information here, but not about whether LLMs can develop into AGI.
      - solidasparagus 2y ago
        Fine, you can ignore my previous comment, that's just my answer to the question that this discussion ultimately takes you to. But I feel like you are just sitting on the sidelines making strawmen and playing pedantic games instead of saying anything constructive. The original comment said: > If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. This is an inflammatory way to state an extreme position on a well-discussed debate over whether next-token prediction can lead to general intelligence. The original commenter clearly believes it can't get you there. If you want to say that with any authority, you need to have an answer for what is different between what we consider general intelligence (for most people, this is simply human intelligence) and what models are capable of. This is the question at the heart of artificial intelligence. I challenged them to explain their answer. I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. If it is obvious that LLMs can't be AGI, the answer to how an LLM differs from human intelligence is also obvious, right?

more_corn 2y ago

LLMs are the language center of an AI. They in no way purport to be: long term memory, critical thinking engines, calculators. If we want those things we can build them. Building them into the language center would be absurd and weird.

daveguy 2y ago
This is a very good take on the current state of LLMs. They are able to articulate surprisingly well and LLMs or something similar will definitely be part of a larger AI model in the future. They are good creative aids, but they should not be trusted.
viking123 2y ago
In the brain all those things are neural networks too, memory is encoded in the weights. So if we want to have that type of system, everyone should have their own model and the weights would actually adjust all the time just like in our brain, but now it is just trained once and that is that
lupire 2y ago
And yet this is what all the big companies we re trying to do, because the LLM is incredibly expensive fixed cost, and they marginal cost for each new task.

solidasparagus 2y ago

> If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generator. Explain to me how humans are fundamentally different

throwanem 2y ago
"Prove me wrong?" That's not how this works. Your implicit claim here is that human cognition and LLM functioning are fundamentally similar. That claim requires substantiation.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  It is how it works if you are replying to someone who claims "If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI". The counter example is human beings are considered general purpose intelligence and we are complex, but fundamentally predictable systems (not by us today), with (as far as we can tell) deterministic outputs based on the state of the universe (including physical being like brain and chemicals).
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Responding to an unsubstantiated claim with an unsubstantiated claim just adds another unsubstantiated claim. So far as I know, whether the universe behaves deterministically remains an unsolved question. Given that, your statement here would already be one of belief rather than fact, even before we get to the parentheticals. There is information here, but not about whether LLMs can develop into AGI.
    - solidasparagus 2y ago
      Fine, you can ignore my previous comment, that's just my answer to the question that this discussion ultimately takes you to. But I feel like you are just sitting on the sidelines making strawmen and playing pedantic games instead of saying anything constructive. The original comment said: > If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. This is an inflammatory way to state an extreme position on a well-discussed debate over whether next-token prediction can lead to general intelligence. The original commenter clearly believes it can't get you there. If you want to say that with any authority, you need to have an answer for what is different between what we consider general intelligence (for most people, this is simply human intelligence) and what models are capable of. This is the question at the heart of artificial intelligence. I challenged them to explain their answer. I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. If it is obvious that LLMs can't be AGI, the answer to how an LLM differs from human intelligence is also obvious, right?