Comment by stavros
8 hours ago
> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning'
If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
Has generative AI made material progress on curing cancer? Has it produced any breakthroughs, at all?
In b4
- it’s the worst it’ll ever be - big leaps happened the fast few months bro
Etc.
Personally I think llm’s can be very powerful in a narrow-band. But the more substance a thing involves, the more a human is needed to be involved.
> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.
I can slow down the compute by a factor of a thousand. It would not change the result. But it changes the economics. We only call it intelligent, because we can do the backpropagation, the inference (and training) fast enough and with enough memory for it to appear this way.
If LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period. Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever doesn't make any difference at all.
Like..a calculator?
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That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.
> You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment
That's not a cure. Like yes, I'd care if the AI says it cures cancer while nuking Chicago. But that isn't what OP said.
"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.