[didericis]

I understand the basics of gradient descent and was a math major, and while applications of that idea are very cool, I don’t think the weird shapes you can make are genuinely generative. I think that generative capability is illusory, it’s “just” smushing existing content together in a weird way. That best fit shape is inherently derivative and not how true creativity and thought which understands context works.

It’s like a weird parrot. But I think a parrot “understands” more because of the shared embedded evolutionary context it has.

That evolutionary history has the key to true intelligence somewhere, but personally I think it’s inevitably hidden/I don’t think we’ll ever understand how intuition and truly non-derivative, non propositional human thought works.

I also don’t think any of what I’m saying negates the value of these models. These models are fantastic autofill generators for a huge swath of different applications and can vastly improve productivity. I’m saying all this in a lot of threads where it comes up because it seems clear there’s going to be too much enthusiastic adoption, which is going to effectively destroy a lot of value of the internet.

The internet is the best tool for finding genuinely creative and novel ideas you were unexposed to that has ever existed. But it is increasingly dominated by derivative unoriginal content that drowns out what I would argue it was designed to help you find. I have no problem with derivative unoriginal content when it’s properly understood as such. I have a problem with how good these things seem to be at tricking people into following something derivative and blind, which seems very very dangerous.