| > Yes, because people think that LLMs are almost AGI.... Surprise, surprise... this has happened before: > Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any life form for that matter.[29] In the independent documentary film Plug & Pray (2010) Weizenbaum said that only people who misunderstood ELIZA called it a sensation.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#Response_and_legacy And, it's easy to see why. You can talk the damn thing, and it talks back! People love to anthropomorphize things, anyway, but if you can talk to it and it talks back, people think there's got to be something to it. This time, though, is a little different. GPT-3 and GPT-4 actually do behave like they understand natural language to a great extent. That makes them directly analogous to Searle's Chinese room construct, and suggests that they could actually pass the Turing test (if suitably fine-tuned). This is great, because, as you say, it's amazing. But I also think it's not good enough, because the fact that GPT-4 may be able to pass the Turing test really says more to me about the limitations of the Turing test than anything else. Likewise with the Chinese room analogy: we know what's in the box, and we know it shouldn't be trusted. But, you're not going to get that kind of analysis from the general public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test |