L4sBotTop physicist says chatbots are just ‘glorified tape recorders’
jadenA physicist is not gonna know a lot more about language models than your average college grad.
That’s absolute nonsense. Physicists have to be excellent statisticians and, unlike data scientists, statisticians have to understand where the data is coming from, not just how to spit out simple summaries of enormously complex datasets as if it had any meaning without context.
And his views are exactly in line with pretty much every expert who doesn’t have a financial stake in hyping the high tech magic 8-ball. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.
Okay but LLMs have multiplied my productivity far more than any tape recorder ever could or ever will. The statement is absolute nonsense.
Do you imagine that music did not exist before we had the means to record it? Vinyl happened before tape but in the early days of computers, tape was what we used to save data and code. Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.
Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.
Could you expand on this? Sounds interesting.
They just played the tapes on TV, kinda screechy, computer-y sounds. They’d tell you when to press record on your cassette recorder before they started. You’d hold it close to the TV speakers until it finished playing, then take the tape and put it in your computer, and there’d be some simple free game to play. I didn’t believe it would work but it did. I still don’t believe it worked. But it did.
There must be a clip somewhere on the internet but my search skills are nowhere near good enough to find one.