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Imagine a fake engineer who read books about engineering as scifi, and thanks to his superhuman memory, he's mastered the engineer-speak so well that he sounds
by akomtu 1y ago
Imagine a fake engineer who read books about engineering as scifi, and thanks to his superhuman memory, he's mastered the engineer-speak so well that he sounds more engineery than top engineers in the world. Except that he has no clue about engineering and to him it's the same as literature or prose. Now he's tasked with designing a bridge. He pauses for a second and starts speaking, in his usual polished style: "sure, let me design a bridge for you." And while he's talking, he's starring at you with his perfect blank face expression, for his mind is blank as well.
Think of the absurdity of trying to understand the Pi number by looking at its first billion digits and trying to predict the next digit. And think of what it takes to advance from memorizing digits of such numbers and predicting continuation with astrology-style logic to understanding the math behind the digits of Pi.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago> Think of the absurdity of trying to understand the Pi number by looking at its first billion digits and trying to predict the next digit. And think of what it takes to advance from memorizing digits of such numbers and predicting continuation with astrology-style logic to understanding the math behind the digits of Pi. I'm prepared to believe that a sufficiently advanced LLM around today will have some "neural" representation of a generalization of a Taylor Series, thus allowing it to "natively predict" digits of Pi.
- discreteevent 1y ago> I'm prepared to believe that a sufficiently advanced LLM This is the opposite of engineering/science. This is animism.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoI want to believe, man. Just two more layers and this thing finally becomes a real boy.
- walleeee 1y agoAnthropic had a recent paper on why llms can't even get e.g. simple arithmetic consistently correct, much less generalize the concept of infinite series. The finding was that they don't find a way to represent the mechanics of an operation, they build chains of heuristics that sometimes happen to work.
- kneegerman 1y agoSometimes I feel this website, very much like LLMs themselves, prove that handling of language in general and purple prose in particular have absolutely no (as in 0) correlation with intelligence.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y agoI suspect your definition of "intelligence" differs from mine.
- weq 1y agoYou have decribed enron musk perfectly without probably even meaning to. I concur that we have "software engineers" in every role at our tech company now that the general populous has learnt how to use chatgtp. This leads to some interesting conversations as above.
- buescher 1y agoIt's worse than that. Imagine he's consistently plausibly wrong about everything, but when you point that out, people think it's just sour grapes at how smart he is.
- imtringued 1y agoThat's not even the worst part. The worst part is that there are people who fit this description as well, and the singularity crowd anthropomorphizes the "human" flaws of the AI as proof of human level intelligence.