[unblough]

For me one major aspect of this “debate” is that the people who see or espouse what I see as over extensions of the abilities of technologies are the ones most unfamiliar with it.

There is an old bit of unscrupulous advice that if someone over assumes your abilities that you should refrain from correcting them.

That is, it benefits the NSA that people think they are actively recording all of their conversations all the time because it forces compliance without the necessary competence, but the people who hold these opinions are often wholly ignorant of the kind of technology required to achieve that level of surveillance.

Have you built your own minigpt? Have you implemented rudimentary transformers?

Are you projecting your desires onto something wholly unworthy of your devotion?

Because the people behind these things are financially incentivized to nod along as your impart more ability than what they know they put into them.

For clarity, my “religion” is math. I believe existence fundamentally is a mathematical construct and as such so are all of its creations.

The brain is to me a mathematical byproduct, but even still, when I familiarized myself with the math of llms and their abilities I recognized that they fall short of being, simulating, or explaining the former.

Llms are stochastic next token pickers, full stop.

Any perceived “intelligence” is projection and anthropomorphising by the agent using them.

I saw a comment on here in another thread stating that the capacity for coherent use of language falls short of being evidence of “intelligence” as children show signs of human “intelligence” long before they can form coherent sentences.

[jddj]

> Have you built your own minigpt?

No, but did follow along to an Andrej Karpathy video along those lines at the beginning of the year.

I didn't want to make a judgement on any kind of superiority, or that LLMs simulate brains, or anything of that nature. Just wanted to question why these elements (namely intelligence and reasoning) strike the nerve that they do.

The anthropomorphism argument is case in point, really. It poses the accusation that the other side is imparting human qualities to a machine, without needing to touch on what makes those qualities human or why that matters in the first place. It is, ironically enough, flawed reasoning.

[unblough]

> Just wanted to question why these elements (namely intelligence and reasoning) strike the nerve that they do.

“Just asking questions” is a meme of the unscrupulous.

I think you are unfairly lumping those who believe in human exceptionalism with those cynical of the economics of such claims.

It’s okay, to me, for people to be ignorant of what llms are. What a dismally bland existence if everyone were just llm experts.

What strikes a nerve with me is the people financially incentivized to do so are leveraging the terror, both the awe and fear interpretations, of those ignorant of the tech.

> The anthropomorphism argument is case in point, really. It poses the accusation that the other side is imparting human qualities to a machine, without needing to touch on what makes those qualities human or why that matters in the first place.

This reads as circular reasoning. Those claiming the opposite are also failing to define what those qualities are.

Anthropomorphism is a real thing. I can flinch in pain for the sake of my couch when a friend jumps onto it, but that hardly provides, without me needing to define human pain explicitly, an opportunity for said friend to respond with the absurd claim that human pain is in fact couch based.

[jddj]

I'll concede the just asking questions point, that much is true.

GPT4 appears to give more intelligent responses than GPT3. To describe that, though, perhaps we need to migrate to a term that doesn't step on the toes of those who, though not human exceptionalists, rather just feel that (these particular?) machines don't happen to suit measurement in such human domains as intelligence.

Of cause, the ship has sailed and they're fighting a lost cause. There's little reason to dig for new words. It's the I in AI and it has been for longer than many here have been alive.