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> How can meat think? Some of us used to think that meat spontaneously generated flies. Maybe someday we'll (re-)learn that meat doesn't spontaneously generat
by svieira 11mo ago
> How can meat think?
Some of us used to think that meat spontaneously generated flies. Maybe someday we'll (re-)learn that meat doesn't spontaneously generate thought either?
- ACCount37 11mo agoI don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust. And especially not now. Not when LLMs can already do pretty much anything that a human can - and some of those things they can even do well.
- svieira 11mo agoGiven that everything the LLM can do it learned from human descriptions of the space ... one would have to posit a very inefficient language for that model not to do something with those billions of parameters. But when you fly because of a bunch of balloons sprinkled with magic fairy dust are pulling you up, the magic fairy dust is still at work.
- ACCount37 11mo agoBefore LLMs, it wasn't even clear how much expressive power human languages have when divorced from the innate properties of human mind or other sensory inputs. An LLM being able to pick up on so many features of human mind, despite not being innately human, just by looking at the text-only language data? Not an outcome everyone expected. Far from it.
- svieira 11mo agoThat is true, I'm glad that LLMs at least demonstrated for everyone except the most committed solipsists that we are all talking about a shared world state and communicating at least moderately effectively with each other.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago>I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust. But you just did. You're praising the man behind the curtain and treating it as the pixie dust you dismissed.
- saltcured 11mo agoMy light-sensing meat read this as "spontaneously generated files" about 3 times before finally seeing maggots instead of tokens...