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.
[New comment instead of editing the old so that you see it]
I managed to find a video of an old skool game loading. That’s what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it’s exactly what they’d play on the TV so you could create your tape.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum Loading - Jetpac
Thank you very much for the effort! I also searched for text or video, but found none.
I understand now what you previously meant, streaming code via TV.
That’s what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it’s exactly what they’d play on the TV so you could create your tape.
Now I have a new confusion: Why would they let the speaker play the bits being processed? It surely was technically possible to load a program into memory without sending anything to the speaker. Or wasn’t it, and it was a technical necessity? Or was it an artistic choice?
I assume it was because they used ordinary tape recorders, that people would otherwise use as dictaphones or to play music. I guess there wasn’t a way to transfer the data silently because the technology was designed to play sound? We had to wait for the floppy disk for silent-ish loading. Ish because they click-clacked a lot, but that was moving parts rather than the code itself.
