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I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/soluti
by einrealist 6mo ago
I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care.
This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
- stavros 6mo ago> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.
- Noumenon72 6mo ago"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment That's not a cure. Like yes, I'd care if the AI says it cures cancer while nuking Chicago. But that isn't what OP said.
- stonyrubbish 6mo ago> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>". It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.
- stavros 6mo agoIf LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period. Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever doesn't make any difference at all.
- davebren 6mo agoLike..a calculator?
- CamperBob2 6mo agoTake a calculator to the International Math Olympiad and let's see how you do.
- einrealist 6mo agoI can slow down the compute by a factor of a thousand. It would not change the result. But it changes the economics. We only call it intelligent, because we can do the backpropagation, the inference (and training) fast enough and with enough memory for it to appear this way.
- bjacobel 6mo agoHas generative AI made material progress on curing cancer? Has it produced any breakthroughs, at all?
- igggh 6mo agoIn b4 - it’s the worst it’ll ever be - big leaps happened the fast few months bro Etc. Personally I think llm’s can be very powerful in a narrow-band. But the more substance a thing involves, the more a human is needed to be involved.
- shruggedatlas 6mo agoYour brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.
- wil421 6mo agoIf you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively. Don’t let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.
- JohnMakin 6mo agopeople like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required. And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintaining muscles, visual/spacial processing taking in massive amounts of data at a very fine scale, and informing the body what to do with it - could go on. One of the more annoying things about this conversation is you don’t even need to make this argument to make the point you’re trying to make, but people love doing it anyway. It needlessly reduces how amazing the human brain is to a bunch of catchy sci fi sounding idioms. It can be simultaneously true that transformer based language models can be very smart and that the human brain is also very smart. It genuinely confuses me why people need to make it an either/or.
- igggh 6mo agoGreat post
- 6mo ago
- semiinfinitely 6mo agocalculator is superhumanly intelligent
- Rover222 6mo agoYeah and everything is just atoms. If you reduce anything enough it’s not real.
- crazylogger 6mo agoIf all they do is "just" brute-force problem solving, then they are already bound to take over R&D & other knowledge work and exponentially accelerate progress, i.e. the SciFi "singularity" BS ends up happening all the same. Whether we classify them as true reasoning is just semantics.
- tim333 6mo agoI don't think anyone does claim they are superhumanly intelligent today in any general way? The question is how they will do in the future.