[Synaesthesia]

It's brilliant at recapitulating the daya it's trained on. It can be extremely useful. But it's still nowhere close the capability of the human brain, not that I expect it to be.

Don't get me wrong I think they are remarkable but I still prefer to call it LLM rather than AI.

[criddell]

Is intelligence a binary thing?

A dog's cognitive capabilities are nowhere near human level. Is a dog intelligent?

[Aloisius]

Some of the things we consider prerequisites of general intelligence (what we usually mean by when we talk about intelligence in these contexts) - like creativity or actual reasoning, are not present at all in LLMs.

An LLM is a very clever implementation of autocomplete. The truly vast amount of information we've fed it provides a wealth of material to search against, the language abstraction allows for autocompleting at a semantic level and we've add enough randomness to allow some variation in responses, but it is still autocomplete.

Anyone who has used an LLM enough in an uncommon domain they are very familiar with has no doubt seen evidence of the machine behind the curtain from faulty "reasoning" where it sometimes just plays madlibs to a complete lack of actual creativity.

[criddell]

Stallman was talking about ChatGPT which isn't just an LLM.

[Aloisius]

He said:

> I call it a "bullshit generator" because it generates output "with indifference to the truth".

And if we follow the link we find he's referring to LLMs:

> “Bullshit generators” is a suitable term for large language models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT, that generate smooth-sounding verbiage that appears to assert things about the world, without understanding that verbiage semantically. This conclusion has received support from the paper titled ChatGPT is bullshit by Hicks et al. (2024).

No one thinks the database, orchestration, tool, etc. portions of ChatGPT are intelligent and frankly, I don't think anyone is confused by using LLM as shorthand not just for the trained model, but also all the support tools around it.

[criddell]

I wasn't thinking about their data store or other infrastructure. I was thinking about the layers added for reasoning and other functions that modify or guide the output of the LLM.