[eschaton]

I don’t understand how so many people on Hacker News engage in this line of questioning.

If by “this technology” you mean “large neural networks” the answer is yes, and we’ve been doing so for several decades now. That’s very specifically what they’re good at.

If you mean “LLMs like ChatGPT” specifically, then no, they’re extremely large neural networks trained on very specific data sets. To perform a different recognition task, you train with different data sets.

Where does this idea that ChatGPT and friends are general-purpose come from?

[famouswaffles]

>Where does this idea that ChatGPT and friends are general-purpose come from?

Maybe reality?

https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/

Large Language Models are as general purpose as they come especially for Machine Learning. They generalize to any kind of pattern, linguistic or not.

[swayvil]

Ya. They've used NN for recognizing faces, airplanes, trolls, songs... all kinds of stuff.

Gleaning useful order from vast dizzying complexity is the name of the game. Or so is my rudimentary understanding.