Comment by IshKebab
14 hours ago
I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense.
"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.
The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.
I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable.
At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.
So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.
And that’s just ants.
They aren't even close to there. There isn't a shred of intelligence in an LLM, let alone sentience.
But understanding that requires reading the code or writing that it spits out rather than having yet another LLM do it for you.
> trivially obviously nonsense
I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto