[cjbprime]

> These things are "only" next token/word guessers.

This is precisely the kind of vacuous "this is technology, I know technology, this is simple" hubristic underestimation that's being called out.

There is no upper bound to the intelligence of a "next token/word guesser". You can end up incorporating an entire world model to your predictions to improve their accuracy, and arguably this has already happened, to a currently-unreliable and basic level. It is possible that no technological advances are required to reach better than human intelligence from this point -- only more compute, bigger models and datasets, and (therefore) better next-token predictions.

[gerdesj]

"This is precisely the kind of vacuous ..."

So I am devoid of anything? Nice. I slapped "only" within quotes to imply that there is more going on and a lot more complexity than implied by a naked reading of my comment. I'm sorry you missed that.

There is no notion of a bound or even intelligence for a LLM. It is a tool and no more - we know how they work - that is defined and we run our own. We can marvel at what looks like intelligence from the outputs but it isn't that. They can be enbiggened ad-nauseam but I very much doubt we'll get intelligence per se.

You might disagree with my arguments but please don't describe me as vacuous.

[cjbprime]

> So I am devoid of anything?

The completion was "vacuous [..] underestimation". Something you appeared to be doing in this one phrase you wrote, not something you are. I don't know anything about you as an entire person. Please try not to take criticism of some of your written thoughts so personally. I continue to take issue with characterizing the LLM as "a word guesser" because it implies a limit to capability that I don't think actually exists.

> There is no notion of a bound or even intelligence for a LLM.

When LLMs are outscoring humans on many/most standardized tests, including for tests where the questions are novel, I also disagree that there is "no notion of intelligence for an LLM". It feels like goalpost-moving, to the extent that I now have no idea what you actually mean when you say intelligence.

> we know how they work

I think this is also a hubristic statement. The researchers working on these systems do not speak like this. They say things like "we did reinforcement learning on question-answering in English and it turns out it answers questions in French too now and we were surprised and can't explain why that happens".