[iliane5]

> But it's not better than almighty human intelligence, it _is_ human intelligence, because it was trained on a mass of some of the best human intelligence in all recorded history

Sure, I was saying "better" in the sense that if for X task, it can do better than Y% of humans.

> since we hand-fed it the answers, it falls a little flat for me

We didn't really hand-fed it any answers though did we? If you put a human in a white box all its life, with access to the entire dataset on a screen but no social interaction, nothing to see aside from the text, nothing to hear, nothing to feel, nothing to taste, etc, it'd be very impressed if they were then able to create answers that seem to display such thoughtful and complex understanding of the world.

[simonh]

I think the human would make a lot of the same fundamental errors LLMs make, for similar reasons. The level to which LLMs seem to understand the world is highly superficial because it is entirely linguistic. Also human written texts about the world and human affairs miss out huge swathes of contextual information that we safely assume actual humans have. LLMs don’t have any of that, which is why they fall flat on their faces in so many ways.

[iliane5]

Absolutely. What’s fascinating is that they’re getting such good understanding of many things through just text. Multimodal models that can process text, images, sounds, video, etc. are gonna be very interesting for that very reason