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Countering the argument that LLMs are just gloriefied probability machines and do not undertand or think with "how do you know humans are not the same" has been
by shafyy 2y ago
Countering the argument that LLMs are just gloriefied probability machines and do not undertand or think with "how do you know humans are not the same" has been the biggest achievement of AI hypemen (and yes, it's mostly men).
Of course, now you can say "how do you know that our brains are not just efficient computers that run LLMs", but I feel like the onus of proof lies on the makers of this claim, not on the other side.
It is very likely that human intelligence is not just autocomplete on crack, given all we know about neuroscience so far.
- mlinhares 2y agoBuT iT CoUlD Be, cAn YoU PrOvE ThAT IT is NOt? I'm having a great experience using Cursor, but i don't feel like trying to overhype it, it just makes me tired to see all this hype. Its a great tool, makes me more productive, nothing beyond that.
- shafyy 2y agoThat's great for you. I'm not diminishing your experience or taking it away. I think we agree on the hype.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoI’ve come to realize AI works as well as it does because it was trained extensively on the same kinds of things people normally ask. So, it already has the benefit of vast amounts of human responses. Of course, ask it a PhD level question and it will confidently hallucinate more than Beavis & Butthead. It really is a damn glorified autocomplete, unfortunately very useful as a search engine replacement.
- uh_uh 2y agoThe LLM is a glorified autocomplete in as much as you are a glorified replicator. Yes, it was trained on autocomplete but that doesn't say much about what capabilities might emerge.
- shafyy 2y ago> Yes, it was trained on autocomplete but that doesn't say much about what capabilities might emerge. No, but we know how it works and it is just a stochastic parrot. There is no magic in there. What is more suprising to me that humans are so predictable that a glorified autocomplete works this well. Then again, it's not that suprising....
- uh_uh 2y agoSorry but this is nonsense. Do you have a theory about when certain LLM capabilities emerge? AFAIK we don't have a good theory about when and why they do emerge. But even if knew how something works (which in present case we don't), shouldn't diminish our opinion of it. Will you have a lesser opinion of human intelligence, once we figure out how it works?
- sfn42 2y agoI'm sure at any given point there's hundreds of this exact discussion occurring in various threads on HN. LLMs are cool, a lot of people find them useful. Hype bros are full of crap and there's no point arguing with them because it's always a pointless discussion. With crypto and nfts it's future predictions which are just inherently impossible to reason about, with ai it's partially that, and partially the whole "do they have human properties" thing which is equally impossible to reason about. It gets discussed to death every single day.
- shafyy 2y ago100%
- shafyy 2y ago> Do you have a theory about when certain LLM capabilities emerge? We do know how LLMs work, correct? We also know what they are capable of and what not (of course this line is often blurred by hype). I am not an expert at all on LLMs or neuroscience. But it is apparent that having a discussion with a human vs. with an LLM is a completely different ballpark. I am not saying that we will never have technology that can "understand" and "think" like a human does. I am just saying, this is not it. Also, just because a lot of progress in LLMs has been made in the past 5 years, that we can just extrapolate the future progress on this. Local maxima and technology limits are a thing.