[BoorishBears]

As a person who builds stuff, I'm tired of these strawmen.

It is helpful that they chose words that are widely understood to represent input vs output.

They even used scare quotes to signal they're not making some overly grand claim in terms of the long tail implications of the terms.

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A person reading the release would learn previously Qwen had a VLM that could understand/see/precive/whateverwordyouwanttouse and now it can generate images which is could be depicting/drawing/portraying/whateverotherwordyouwanttouse

We don't have to invent a crisis past that.

[godelski]

  > As a person who builds stuff, I'm tired of these strawmen.

Who says I don't build stuff?[0]

Allow me to quote Knuth. I think we can agree he built a lot of stuff

  | If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.

This is important. I don't know you and your beliefs, but some people truly believe theory is useless. But it's the foundation of everything we do.

  > We don't have to invent a crisis past that.

You're right. But I'm not. Qwen isn't the only one here in the larger conversation. Look around the comments and see who can't tell the difference. Look at the announcements companies make. PhD level intelligence? lol. So I suggest taking your own advice. I've made no strawman...

[0] my undergrad I did experimental physics, not theory. I then worked as an aerospace engineer for years. I built a literal rocket engine. I built advanced radiation shielding that NASA uses. Then I came back to school and my PhD is in CS. I build things. Don't confuse the fact that I want to understand things interferes with that. Truth is I'm good at building things because I spend time with theory. See Knuth

[BoorishBears]

I didn't say you don't build stuff: that diatribe is just very clearly someone speaking as an academic.

You're presumably intelligent enough to realize the writer here wasn't trying to define "understanding" from first principles.

And from a more practical mindset you'd hopefully realize it's not a useful expenditure of energy for them or the reader to enter the tarpit in the first place.

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So far, if I extract the one practice-minded point you've touched on, it's much narrower: how the lack of generalization intersects with parties making claims about "PhD levels of intelligence" based on narrow benchmarks.

That's the conversation that can be had without resorting to strawmen or declaring an impasse on the language used to describe these systems until we've found the terms that satisify all other disciplines in addition to this one.

Maybe you've spent your life absorbing Knuth's essence and know better than me, but he strikes me as pragmatic enough to not fall for that trap either.

He even refers to LLMs as X% intelligent machines after he decided having someone else use ChatGPT on his behalf was the best way to evaluate it, right?

[godelski]

  > I didn't say you don't build stuff

You're right.

  > You're presumably intelligent enough to realize

There's two types of people Those that can extrapolate data.