[10c8]

While I agree, I can't help but wonder: if such a "super search engine" were to have the knowledge on how to solve individual steps of problems, how different would that be from an "intelligent" thing? I mean that, instead of "searching" for the next line of code, it searches for the next solution or implementation detail, then using it as the query that eventually leads to code.

[chongli]

Having knowledge isn't the same as knowing. I can hold a stack of physics papers in my hand but that doesn't make me a physics professor.

LLMs possess and can retrieve knowledge but they don't understand it, and when people try to get them to do that it's like talking to a non-expert who has been coached to smalltalk with experts. I remember reading about a guy who did this with his wife so she could have fun when travelling to conferences with him!

[IAmGraydon]

I've spent a lot of time thinking about that - what if the realization that we need is not that LLMs are intelligent, but that our own brains work in the same way as the LLMs. There is certainly a cognitive bias to believe that humans are somehow special and that our brains are not simply machinery.

The difference, to me, is that an LLM can very efficiently recall information, or more accurately, a statistical model of information. However, they seem to be unable to actually extrapolate from it or rationalize about it (they can create the illusion of rationalization be knowing what the rationalization would look like). A human would never be able to ingest and remember the amount of information that an LLM can, but we seem to have the incredible ability of extrapolation - to reach new conclusions by deeply reasoning about old ones.

This is much like the difference in being "book smart" and "actually smart" that some people use to describe students. Some students can memorize vast amounts of information, pass all tests with straight A's, only to fail when they're tasked with thinking on their own. Others perform terribly on memorization tasks, but naturally are gifted at understanding things in a more intuitive sense.

I have seen heaps of evidence that LLMs have zero ability to reason, so I believe that there's something very fundamental missing. Perhaps the LLM is a small part of the puzzle, but there doesn't seem to be any breakthroughs that seem like we might be moving towards actual reasoning. I do think that the human brain can very likely be emulated if we cracked the technology. I just don't believe we're close.