“Artificial Intelligence is an unhelpful term. It serves as a vehicle for people's invalid assumptions. It hand-waves an enormous amount of complexity regarding what ‘intelligence’ even is or means.“

“Our understanding of intelligence is a moving target. We only have one meaningful fixed point to work from. We assert that humans are intelligent. Whether anything else is, is not certain. What intelligence itself is, is not certain.”

2/

“While the capabilities are fantasy, the dangers are real. These tools have denied people jobs, housing, and welfare. All erroneously. They have denied people bail and parole, in such a racist way it would be comical if it wasn't real.

👇👇👇
“And the actual function of AI in all of these situations is to obscure liability for the harm these decisions cause.”

3/

“What [LLM] parameters don't represent is anything like knowledge or understanding. That's just not what LLMs do. The model doesn't know what those tokens mean. I want to say it only knows how they're used, but even that is over stating the case, because it doesn't •know• things. It •models• how those tokens are used.

“…The model doesn't know, or understand, or comprehend anything about that data any more than a spreadsheet containing the same information would understand it.”

4/

“The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code.”

Do you see where this is going? Have I convinced you to read the whole thing yet?

https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

5/

Here it is: the One Weird Thing that people who aren’t programmers (or are bad programmings) just don’t understand about writing software. This is it. If you miss this, you’ll miss what LLMs can and can’t do for software development. You’ll be prey to the hype, a mark for the con.

6/