4 ms·
No it's not "just a very good autocomplete". I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) but I find it an extremely counterproductive position. Some
by ozgung 1y ago
No it's not "just a very good autocomplete". I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) but I find it an extremely counterproductive position. Some people just love to dismiss the capabilities of AI with a very shallow understanding of how it works. Why?
It generates words one by one, like we all do. This doesn't mean it does just that and nothing else. It's the mechanics of how they are trained and how they do inference. And most importantly how they communicate with us. It doesn't define what they are or their limits. This is reductionism. Ignoring the mathematical complexity of a giant neural network.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 1y agoI can't say for certain that our wetware isn't "just a very good autocomplete".
- esafak 1y agoA very good autocomplete is realized by developing an understanding.
- Bjartr 1y ago> like we all do Do we though? Sure, we communicate sequentially, but that doesn't mean that our internal effort is piecewise and linear. A modern transformer LLM however is. Each token is sampled from a population exclusively dependent on the tokens that came before it. Mechanistically speaking, it works similarly to autocomplete, but at a very different scale. Now how much of an unavoidable handicap this incurs, if any, is absolutely up for debate. But yes, taking this mechanistic truth and only considering it in a shallow manner underestimates the capability of LLMs by a large degree.
- kenjackson 1y agoOur thinking is also based only on events that occurred previously in time. We don’t use events in the future.
- ElevenLathe 1y agoIs this a certainty? I thought it was an open question whether quantum effects are at play in the brain, and those have a counterintuitive relationship with time (to vastly dumb things down in a way my grug mind can comprehend).
- kenjackson 1y agoWell there’s no evidence of this that I’ve seen. If so, then maybe that is what is the blocker for AGI.
- ElevenLathe 1y agoI think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it. In other words, we're not sure or not if the brain has some kind of special sauce that doesn't just reduce to linear algebra.
- wasabi991011 1y agoQuantum effects definitely reduce to linear algebra however.
- kenjackson 1y ago"I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it." We don't? AFAIK we have no proof of anyone being able to see into the future. Now maybe there are other manifestations of this, but I know of no test today that even hints at it.
- wasabi991011 1y agoI'm aware of a counterintuitive relationship with space, but what's the one with time?
- CamperBob2 1y agoI don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) Because they simply don't care if they're wrong. At this point, given what we've seen, that seems like the only explanation left. You don't need to be a fanatical AGI evangelist, but when an "autocomplete" starts winning international math competitions, you need to start calling it something else.