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Comment by nozzlegear

7 hours ago

I think we have wildly different conclusions about what happened here. You see the machine as instructing Terrence Tao, as if it were Plato teaching Socrates about the theory of forms; I see Terrence Tao using the machine to teach himself, like an intelligent student uses a book. In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do, because it generates language in much the same way we do when we think and reason.

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nozzlegear

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slidehero  2 hours ago

> In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do

that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book.

at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously.

Terrence is impressed. Good enough for me.

  • nozzlegear  44 minutes ago

    > that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book.

    I'm sure people thought calculators and, indeed, computers themselves were very Harry Potter as well when they first came out. But in the fullness of time the magic and mystique has drained away, and we're left with the understanding that they're just tools.

    > at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously.

    Similarly I have a hard time taking seriously the people who make breathless claims of intelligence where there's only a text calculator with weights applied. It's like watching the devout cry "miracle!" at every strangely shaped piece of toast.

    Terrence is impressed, but he's not a believer.

    • slidehero  17 minutes ago

      >I'm sure people thought calculators and, indeed, computers themselves were very Harry Potter

      nobody thought that