Comment by nottorp
7 days ago
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
> They can clearly do things that involve reasoning
No.
> but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data.
The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter.
Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
18 replies →
> No.
You are missing the forest for the trees by dismissing this so readily.
LLMs can solve IMO-level math problems, debug quite difficult bugs in moderately sized codebases, and write prototypes for very unique and weird coding projects. They solve difficult reasoning problems, and so I find it mystifying that people still work so hard to justify their belief that they're "not actually reasoning". They are flawed reasoners in some sense, but it seems ludicrous to me to suggest that they are not reasoning at all when they generalise to new logical problems so well.
Do you think humans are logical machines? No, we are not. Therefore, do we not reason?
2 replies →
> "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet"
... who can also type at superhuman speeds, but has no self-awareness, creativity or initiative.