Comment by whizzter

You're asserting that they're unscientific by sampling some random signatories.

Looking through the signatories a bit closer there's a bunch of comp-sci professors and phd's, some of them had been working directly with neural network based methods, bunch of other that are in adjacent fields related to speech systems I encountered during my studies that have been upended by neural networks so they should also have a fair grasp of what capabilities have been added over the years.

One of the papers listed in the letter you linked to does seem to cut directly to the argument that there's a correlation in the data LLM's store that give people an exaggerated view of AI's capabilities by successfully encoding knowledge data.

I do agree that we shouldn't base policy on unscientific claims, and that's the main crux, since Der Leyens's statements mostly seems to be parroting Altmans hype (and Altman is primarily an executive with a vested interest in keeping up the valuation of OpenAI to justify all the investments).