Jeff AtwoodOne of Rusty's all time best, well worth your time: https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people
Maarten@codinghorror I think there are a bunch of terrible arguments in that essay. Focusing on the 200 lines of Python is like saying “meat that thinks?!” Everyone thinks human intelligence is so special and I think we’re going to come out of this in 5 or 10 or 20 years and conclude that it isn’t as special as we thought, just like Life wasn’t due to a special life force and souls don’t exist. 1/
@codinghorror The question is not what the 200 lines of code do, they are merely like the handful of neurotransmitters in out biology. The question is what’s going on in the billions of model parameters that seem to encode not only word patterns but also some algorithms for behavior.
The issue of needing to see more training examples than humans need has been addressed by pointing to the work evolution has done in shaping humans that we need to do brute force for LLMs. 2/
@codinghorror And yes, there *are* issues with lack of grounding in the physical world.
I don’t think LLMs are synthetic humans or have emotions, but once we run these things with persistent state and long continuous loops, I expect the results to start to resemble humans a lot more.