Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.

It is a pattern matcher. It does not reason.

But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.

I have a degree in computer science. Irrelevant. Anyone can see that the "AI" is not intelligence.

Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.

It's a large language model. It generates text.

All Columbus did was sail west.

And killed indigenous people. Datacenters and shitty chatbots are killing people today, good point.

All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.

Scientists did that, not America.

All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.

At least he did it himself instead of prompting an image generator.

All this PhD student did was generate text.

Correct. And you seem to have learned nothing useful.

Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there.

LLMs can sometimes be useful. AI does not yet exist. It's a scam.

If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.

You don't understand the metaphor. It's about the nature of infinity, not the competency of monkeys as authors.

If you run an AI prompt infinite times, it will inevitably generate a correct answer somewhere in there. The rest of the time, it will be wrong, potentially with lethal consequences.

Yes but somebody also has to verify your outputs and then somebody has to verify that person's outputs and so on and so forth, so clearly it's actually impossible for humans to create anything ever. /sarcasm

If you can’t see the difference between a compiler and a large language model

If you can't see the difference between a given example and the underlying logic...

And if the entirety of your argument is a mystic “and all that stuff”

What, you want me to list the entirety of sciences downstream from physics that are involved in generating and predicting movement in mammals? Because that could, like, take a while...

We have robots outpacing human performance in specific tasks using neural networks.

Because they were created BY HUMANS to do exactly that.

Also, LLMs can perform on tasks they weren't explicitly trained for.

Such as?

You might be a few years behind. We have robots outpacing human performance in specific tasks using neural networks.

Might well be behind here, but to my knowledge we don't have a single robot outpacing a single human in most tasks. They don't do one-shot learning from their mistakes, they don't learn new movements randomly. Because most basically just use static weights when operating, because you don't really want an industrial robot to get ideas. But even test systems that can learn usually just have an equivalent to the movement model of a brain, maybe a vision model, just like an LLM is just a language model. You would need a system that has all of those, plus the other brain areas, especially a prefrontal cortex like model for integration.

I'm sure people are working on it, but I haven't heard of anything successful yet. I imagine there might be a being like that in secret which is currently tortured in some billionaires tech dungeon. Poor thing.

Also, LLMs can perform on tasks they weren’t explicitly trained for. This line is not as well defined as you make it sound.

Yeah but that's coincidental. It's the model weights, prompt, and the RNG aligning. They can mock reasoning, because they do it by what they always do, predict more text, but it's not like this has any effect on themselves. They aren't really understanding a mistake when you point it out and growing neurons and synapses, i.e. they won't have different model weights the next time you ask the same question. They can only really change when the powers that be release an update, which includes new training data, and hence model weights.

Indeed. Also look at the down votes on my comment. 😂

But yeah, generative AI has so many environmental and ethical issues that I am totally and wholly against its use in most cases, but you made a fair point and that should be recognized.