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Comment by deegles

5 months ago

I'm not convinced LLMs will evolve into general AI. The promises that it's just around the corner feels increasingly like a big scam.

I was never on board with it. It feels like the same step change google was - there was a time when it was just miles ahead of everything else out there around 1998. The first time you used it, it was like "geez, you got it right, didn't know that was possible". It's big, changed things, but wasn't an end of history event a bunch of people are utterly convinced this is.

We just need a little more of your (not mine) money to get there. Would I lie to you for $100 billion?

Depends what you mean by evolve. I don't think we'll get general AI by simply scaling LLMs, but I think general AI, if it arrives, will be able to trace its lineage very much back to LLMs. Journeys through the embedding space very much feel like the way forward to me, and that's what LLMs are.

  • Embedding spaces are one thing, LLMs are quite another.

    I believe the former are understandable and likely a part of true AGI but the latter a series of hacks, at worst a red herring leading us off the proper track into a deadend.

  • Is there a resource I can use to understand the difference between embedding space and latent space?

I mean it’s been a couple of years!

It may or may not happen but “scam” means intentional deceit. I don’t think anyone actually knows where LLMs are going with enough certainty to use that pejorative.

  • Is it intentional deceit to tell everyone it's leading to something when, as you correctly point out, nobody actually knows if it will?

  • >“scam” means intentional deceit.

    Yes. I'm pretty sure any engineer working on this knows it's not "a few years away". But it doesn't stop product teams from taking adcvantadge of the hype cycle. Hence, "use deception to deprive (someone) of money or possessions.".

    • I'm equally sure there are true believers who've drunk the Kool-aid and really believe AGI is right around the corner, just need to fix a few bugs and wait just a few more generations of Moore's law. What difference does the beliefs of a nameless engineer at an AI company make?

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