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by chpatrick 840 days ago
Why? People also produce somewhat random outputs, so?
1 comments

A lot of things are going to look the same when you aren't wearing your glasses. You don't even appear to be trying to describe these things in a realistic fashion. There is nothing of substance in this argument.
Look, let's say you have a black box that outputs one character at a time in a semi-random way and you don't know if there's a person sitting inside or if it's an LLM. How can you decide if it's intelligent or not?
I appreciate the philosophical direction you're trying to take this conversation, but I just don't find discussing the core subject matter in such an overly generalized manner to be stimulating.
The original argument by vineyardmike was "LLMs are a next character predictor, therefore they are not intelligent". I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor, yet you can still communicate intelligently. What part do you disagree with?
> I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor

A smart entity being able to emulate a dumber entity doesn't support in any way that the dumber entity is also smart.

Sure, but the original argument was that next-character-prediction implies lack of intelligence, which is clearly not true when a human is doing it.

That doesn't mean LLMs are intelligent, just that you can't claim they're unintelligent just because they generate one character at a time.

You're not emulating anything. If you're communicating with someone, you go piece by piece. Even thoughts are piece by piece.
I'm not sure what point you think you are making by arguing with the worst possible interpretations of our comments. Clearly intelligence refers to more than just being able to put unicode to paper in this context. The subject matter of this thread was a LLM's inability to perform basic tasks involving analytical reasoning.
No, that's shifting the goalposts. The original claim was that LLMs cannot possibly be intelligent due to some detail of how they output the result ("smarter autocorrect").