Hi, I work with generative machines. Everything from Markov chain generators to GPT-3. I’ve trained and tuned many models with GPT2 and 3, all with the intent of simulating human interaction.

I know a fair bit about generative machines, both how they work, and how to tune and interact with them to get particular results.

I need you to hear this: they do not know or understand anything. They are complex probability tables.

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Thanks to very clever programming and increasingly powerful GPUs, they are deeply complex and precise probability tables, but they are still only inferring based on what they’ve seen in the past.

We don’t understand how organic brains learn. Building an electronic brain remains science fiction.

LLMs produce an impressive simulacra of human language, but there is no there there.

I jokingly say that they “make shit up,” but that implies intent and ability to conceptualize.

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These machines can do neither. They produce strings of tokens that statistically appear like they were produced by a human.

To an LLM the statements “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon” and “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on Mars” are differentiated only in that more people have written the former than the latter.

That’s it.

AI doesn’t exist and companies letting what we DO have make decisions is just a way to avoid culpability for the results.

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@ieatkillerbees
I agree with this. But it also shows that no "intelligence" is needed for nearly every under grad essay. You just need some nice structure and regurgitate what other people have said (with sources)

I still think the more we learn about "AI" the narrower whatever true intelligence is becomes.

@jfrench @ieatkillerbees I heard in the news this morning that some travel agencies had started using ChatGPT for producing descriptions of travel destinations and thought it would completely replace some employees within the next year or so. I was laughing, as a good travel destination continuously evolve and new things appear - ChatGPT will always just describe the past and never the present/future.