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Comment by davebren

1 hour ago

> What is preventing AI from continuing to improve until it is absolutely better than humans at any mental task?

No matter how much compute time it's given to combine training samples with each other and run through a validation engine it will still be missing some chunk of the "long tail". To make progress in the long tail it would need to have understanding, and not just a mimicry of understanding. Unless that happens they will always be dependent on the humans that they are mimicking in order to improve.

What is the difference between what LLM's do and "true" understanding?

I feel like people grasping straws on the shrinking limitations of AI systems are just copying the "god of the gaps" fallacy

  • > What is the difference between what LLM's do and "true" understanding?

    The thing where you can understand the meaning of this sentence without first compiling a statistical representation of a 10 trillion line corpus of training data.

    Unless you're an NPC of course.

    • I mean brains get a lot of training data too in order to understand language. I don't think you provided a relevant difference.

      Or rather, maybe I don't understand what you mean :)

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