Comment by maplethorpe
2 days ago
I mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?
I don't actually think its silly to call it auto complete.
Personally I could see it being either one. The LLM companies have drastically underfunded projects for things like interoperability. As long as inference is a black box we don't know whether its text prediction as a fancy tool or if something crazier has emerged that could be considered intelligent, self aware, conscious, etc. The former is easily assumed by the architecture, the latter seem far fetched but we simply can't know.
> Because it's capable of impressive things?
Precisely. Calling it autocomplete when it's capable of completing tasks that have nothing to do with autocomplete is silly. If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete". What makes it double silly is that you can't really exclude that human intelligence is a stochastic process.
You're making an assumption that there is no difference between intelligence and auto complete with sufficient resources and learned patterns to complete tasks a human might do.
There may not be a difference there, I don't know but I wouldn't assume that intelligence is nothing more than sufficiently complex auto complete.
I'm not making that assumption. Specifically - I'm not making any assumption about nature of human intelligence, including not making assumption that it's not stochastic process. You exclude possibility that it is stochastic process without any good reason for it (wanting to call AI complex auto complete while keeping human intelligence completely safe from that label really is not good reason).
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> If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete".
I'm fine with calling any process "autocomplete" if it takes language as input and returns predicted language as output.
I don't feel any need to broaden the definition to include things that have nothing to do with language.