Comment by mrandish

> just (expensive) magic trick

Related: as an actual magician, although no longer performing professionally, I was telling another magician friend the other day that IMHO, LLMs are the single greatest magic trick ever invented judging by pure deceptive power. Two reasons:

1. Great magic tricks exploit flaws in human perception and reasoning by seeming to be something they aren't. The best leverage more than one. By their nature, LLMs perfectly exploit the ways humans assess intelligence in themselves and others - knowledge recall, verbal agility, pattern recognition, confident articulation, etc. No other magic trick stacks so many parallel exploits at once.

2. But even the greatest magic tricks don't fool their inventors. David Copperfield doesn't suspect the lady may be floating by magic. Yet, some AI researchers believe the largest, most complex LLMs actually demonstrate emergent thinking and even consciousness. It's so deceptive it even fools people who know how it works. To me, that's a great fucking trick.