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This is good: > If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinki

• dboreham 3mo ago
  I'm also getting irritated with the “glorified autocomplete” comments. Since nobody can post such comments and also use the tools I'm using, I'm wondering if the phenomenon is due to people only having experience with the free version of whatever it is they're trying to use?
  • dgellow 3mo ago
    The “glorified autocomplete” framing isn’t to take literally. It’s a way to remove the mystic and whole anthropomorphization of AI. It’s saying they aren’t sentient or entities we are interacting with, even if that’s how the output presents itself. Instead they are “just” stochastic models
    • simonw 3mo ago
      Some people use it to demystify, but a whole lot of people seem to be using it to dismiss the technology entirely. Personally I like to remind people that these things are next-token predictors, but then emphasize how truly astonishing the results we can get out of sufficiently advanced next-token predictors are.
      • ameliaquining 3mo ago
        I'm curious, what are you hoping to convey by reminding people that LLMs are next-token predictors? They are, of course, but most people without an AI background won't fully understand what that means, so I assume you're using it at least partly as a proxy for something else.
        • simonw 3mo ago
          I think understanding how this stuff works is really important. For technical people it gives them a useful starting point for understanding it all. For less technical people it's crucial to help them understand that it's not some weird new magical science-fiction AI - it's still computer programs that turn text into numbers and do stuff with the numbers and turn those back into text. It's harder to believe something is conscious or threatening to achieve word domination once you understand that it's a machine that statistically figures out which word should come next.
          • dgellow 3mo ago
            While you’re active in this thread, I just want to say thank you for all your writing, you’re such a reliable source of sanity in that crazy new world :)
          • ameliaquining 3mo ago
            I don't think the next-token-predictor thing should increase anyone's confidence that LLMs aren't conscious or can't escape the control of their operators. A very closely analogous argument would "prove" that humans aren't conscious or can't do [insert task here] either. (No, I'm not saying that any of this is true of today's LLMs, I'm saying this particular argument doesn't work.) I recommend this explanation: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-ais-job https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-...
            • dgellow 3mo ago
              You can say that for any argument regarding consciousness, because we don’t have an actual, all encompassing definition of what consciousness is. In general I don’t think comparison with humans makes much sense, we should be able to discuss LLMs without always falling back to “but what about humans” (sorry for the caricature)
    • argee 3mo ago
      Exactly. They ARE "glorified autocomplete" in an ontological sense. That says nothing about capability or outcome. The people who come out swinging against that characterization usually ignore the whole ontological argument (which is...the entire point) and go after an outcome-based strawman.
      • ameliaquining 3mo ago
        Isn't the outcomes question the one that people actually care about in most contexts?
        • argee 3mo ago
          Depends. "Most" implies majority, and the majority of people are using these tools not for programming but in contexts where ontology is more relevant than capability (not that capability is irrelevant, but most people care, or are tricked into caring, far more about the former).
          • ameliaquining 3mo ago
            Sorry, what contexts are these?
            • argee 3mo ago
              Sorry, this discussion is too incommensurable for me.
            • notahacker 3mo ago
              I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend" Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure. (tbf I think the "glorified autocomplete" still works surprisingly well for programming outcomes too. Autocomplete [and fuzzy search of reference material] actually is useful and often right and certainly can save time even when it's only suggesting the rest of the variable name. But you might not want to commit everything it suggests...)
    • cyanydeez 3mo ago
      I like glorified copy/paste frankensteined with find/replace.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      But... These are also literally glorified autocomplete. Autoregressive language models are all autocomplete. It turns out that advanced enough autocomplete can do interesting stuff.
    • Groxx 3mo ago
      I generally like it still. It describes their failure modes pretty well, and in a way that most people already recognize. They're incomparably more complex, of course, but they are not intelligent and they are very much repeating what they've seen without any capability for factual accuracy. Practically every other attempt at describing them leans too technical and unfamiliar (stochastic parrot) or too anthropomorphic (even describing them as "not like a human" gets people thinking in terms of humans, like how if I mention that your tongue is in your mouth all the time, using up almost all of the room, feeling your teeth and tasting itself, you're now uncomfortably aware of it and the numerous bumps on the surface). You need to work from a reference that has both a shared understanding, and does not lead to problematic "if X has Y, and Z is like X, then Z has Y" seemingly-logical derived beliefs. "Spicy autocomplete" is a fairly safe starting point in both ways.
      • red75prime 3mo ago
        "Repeating what they've seen" could be, depending on their generalization abilities, something like low-n-gram Markov chain, repeating of surface-level speech patterns, repeating reasoning patterns, repeating mind-theory-level patterns, repeating self-correction patterns and so on.
        • Groxx 3mo ago
          And they fall somewhere between "surface-level speech patterns" and "repeating reasoning patterns" imo, yeah. They do indeed learn higher-order patterns than a Markov chain... but they'll blatantly misapply reasoning patterns and self-contradict confidently, just like you see with human bullshitters who don't understand one bit of what they're doing. They sound fairly human, until you notice the patterns. They sound like they're thinking, until you pay attention.
    • bawolff 3mo ago
      Which obviously raises the question of if we are just glorified autocomplete (or glorified pattern matching). After all, we evolved from things just trying to recognize the patterns for what will hurt us and what will cause pleasure.
    • gwd 3mo ago
      There was an interview I watched with Cory Doctorow just a few weeks ago, where someone asked him, "What kind of evidence could be presented to you to make you believe that LLMs were now ready to replace people at jobs entirely?" And he basically responded that he didn't think it was possible they ever would, because they're not really thinking, they just "predict the next token". This in spite of him actually having first-hand experience with people getting loads of value out of Claude Code and GPT Codex.
      • brookst 3mo ago
        Doctorow is one of those people who makes money from what he believes, so it’s very unlikely he’ll ever change his beliefs.
    • brookst 3mo ago
      It’s such willful blindness though. Why deny that there is a huge gulf between autocomplete and sentience? It’s like saying cars are glorified bicycles because they’re sure not airplanes.
  • mostlylurks 3mo ago
    The models themselves are indeed glorified autocomplete in terms of what they actually do (with things like agentic coding harnesses being required as a wrapper around them to make that internal autocomplete something more useful). Many people use this fact to critique LLMs, but many other common instances of people pointing out LLMs' apparent lack of intelligence actually come from people not understanding that the model is a glorified autocomplete underneath whatever interface people access them through, and the interface isn't providing the underlying model all the information they assume it would, making it seem less intelligent than it actually is.
  • probably_wrong 3mo ago
    Let's say I'm one of such people. How would you convince me that your comment is any different from the ones we've been getting since roughly GPT-3 claiming that AGI is finally here and that, while the previous models were bad, this time they'll live up to the hype?
  • regularfry 3mo ago
    For me it's more an expression of how much mileage you can get out of "glorified", how many tasks devolve down to "if you model language accurately enough, look what drops out" because it turns out that to model language you need to model how the world works. I don't use it to minimise the capabilities at all.
• jiggawatts 3mo ago
  My mental model is this: There is a vast ocean of human knowledge, far beyond the capacity of any human brain, even within specialised fields. Books helped "plug the gaps" in our knowledge, increasing the scope that a single human mind can encompass. Web search engines did the same thing, but more and faster. LLMs are like search engines on steroids, essentially a research librarian that operates at 1,000x human speed and can "in context" locate relevant information, adapting it to fit the hole it needs to go into as well. It feels less like discovering new theorems, but instead having direct access to all theorems, which is hugely valuable in itself. I.e.: the recent counterexamples to open conjectures has largely been about the AIs "trawling through all the things" and scraping together every bit of human-generated knowledge ever produced that is relevant to the conjecture. Conversely, in the past, we had to "make do" with sub-standard solutions where the problem had been solved, but finding every relevant solution in the ocean of knowledge was prohibitively time consuming. In some sense, LLMs will "raise the floor" in what is considered the minimum level of quality of a solution, where even throwaway / toy designs will now start applying every bit of accumulated wisdom instead of just some of it. We have mechanised attention.
  • simianwords 3mo ago
    Well put. I just think humans do this at a higher better level and not qualitatively different.
  • dandaka 3mo ago
    Great summarization of current capabilities of models, thank you
  • chasd00 3mo ago
    > LLMs are like search engines on steroids i like the analogy of a lossy compression algorithm. The LLM compresses all of the data it was trained on to answer the question it was asked.
  • Roark66 3mo ago
    That is a good analogy. But the limitations of LLMs seem to be where they lack some information they tend to hallucinate/invent. The rare benchmarks that measure "knowing what the model knows it doesn't know" show us there are only a couple models like Opus that are good in that field. I think this is something that receives not enough attention from researchers.
• sph87 3mo ago
  > AGI is already here I feel like there has been a ton of noise about this, but frankly, no one has actually defined what AGI means. I feel like the goal post is constantly shifting. Take for example Humanity's Last Exam. It is so broad and complex that while an individual in a specific field might be able to answer their specific area of questions, they certainly would not be able to achieve >50% on the total question set. There is this idea that AI has to be perfect to be intelligent - but we consider Humans intelligent and they are not even close. So is it the ability to generate novel ideas? Prove theorems? Pass tests? I am not arguing that rote memorization is intelligence, or that we have achieved it, but does anyone know what AGI actually.. is?
  • annzabelle 3mo ago
    There's a specific singularity theory of AI that is very popular. Eliezer Yudkowsky helped popularize it among the Bay Area "rationalist" community, and it has this idea that AGI necessarily implies a self improving system that will quickly become a paperclip maximizer or other such dystopian or utopian world changing intelligence. By that singularity definition, we're probably nowhere near AGI, but if we define it as something that is as good at text/information manipulation as the 50th percentile human? I think we're already there.
    • kijin 3mo ago
      We'll probably be able to tell if and when Yudkowsky's AGI arrives. Once AI can improve itself, frontier labs will no longer need human developers. So we might see a massive layoff of top talent and a dramatic increase in product quality at the same time. This usually doesn't happen in human businesses. It is also very much against the interest of anyone who is already at the top of the pay table at those labs.
      • shard972 3mo ago
        What you describe would still be limited with so called AGI due to the existing organizational, legal and social structures around basic things like responsibility. We could have scifi level robots available today and these non-tech issues would still need to be resolved for a company to just fire all it's employees.
• movpasd 3mo ago
  I feel like the development of AI has really shown what a gigantic spectrum intelligence actually is.
• heresie-dabord 3mo ago
  There is grotesque hype for this new category of software. And the skittish AGI debate generates more noise than it's worth. Do use the tool if it offers material/measurable improvement for your use-case, but budget carefully and keep your people. They probably do actually know what your material/measurable use-case really is. If you only talk to yezbotz, you may zuck yourzelf into a corner and look like a zhmendrick.