[philipwhiuk]

From the first sentence

> I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem

You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.

[xeyownt]

What a poor explanation.

With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force.

When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.

[chrisjj]

"Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.

[Jtarii]

You can't understand human behaviour by reading a physics textbook.

[chrisjj]

Of course not. One of the major differences between intelligent and word-guessing autocomplete.

[Jtarii]

Do you think you could explain all AI behaviour by reading a physics textbook?

[chrisjj]

Nope. But someone smart enough could.

[rcxdude]

At a certain level of abstraction, yes.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I just don't think that's correct. When I ask Claude to solve something for me, it takes a number of actions on my computer which are neither writing text nor interpreting the done token. It executes the build, debugs tests, et cetera. Sometimes it spawns mini-mes when it thinks that would be helpful! I think saying this is all "autocomplete" is a category error, like saying that you shouldn't talk about clicking buttons or running programs because it's all just electrically charged silicon under the hood.

[happygoose]

technically, it does all that by outputting text, like `run_shell_command("cargo build")` as part of its response. But you could easily say similar things about humans.

To me, "autocomplete" seems like it describes the purpose of a system more than how it functions, and these agents clearly aren't designed to autocomplete text to make typing on a phone keyboard a bit faster.

I feel like people compare it to "autocomplete" because autocomplete seems like a trivial, small, mundane thing, and they're trying to make the LLMs feel less impressive. It's a rhetorical trick that is very overused at this point.

[zzzeek]

yup, or "I played a first person shooter and shot lots of bad guys"

wrong! pushed buttons on your playstation in response to graphical simulations, duh

[Jtarii]

When someone asks you a question in what ways are you not an "autocomplete"?

You aren't aware of how you come up with the words you are saying, you just start talking and the next word somehow falls out of your mouth. Maybe you think before you start talking, but where do the thoughts come from? They just appear to you in your head. We are just as much a predictive machine as LLMs, the human brain is just fuzzier.

[ButlerianJihad]

Human minds have the ability to reason and to evaluate sources by different authorities. It is why some children are able to obey their parents while ignoring scammers on TV commercials, shouting at them to buy stuff.

We are also able to apply lived experience to our reasoning. That is why we can accurately answer a question about whether to drive or walk to the car wash. Or how we could immediately see how many "r"s are in "strawberry".

LLMs, being "glorified autocomplete" don't have a real way to separate truth from lies, or critically evaluate sources of information. Humans can absorb information in various ways, such as our "classic five senses" which inform our daily lives and motions, or by absorbing information via reading, hearing, seeing, etc., or by inferring and reasoning and being "guided by the Spirit" in a more metaphysical way where LLMs would fail.

[gloosx]

Thoughts are derivative of sensory processing. We have subjective experience and subjective feeling, our symbols are grounded in physical reality. LLM "thoughts" are simulacrum, manipulating symbols according to rules does not imply understanding. One must be quite derealised to think we are predictive machinery or the human brain is just a fuzzier – it is much more than that.

[slopinthebag]

Well, maybe this is how you think but not everyone is a self-admitted NPC. Speak for yourself only please.

[Jtarii]

Think of a movie.

You had literally -zero- input in what your brain gave you as an answer. It just gave you something, you can make up whatever story you want to tell yourself, "it's my favourite movie", "I saw it last week", whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the words on your screen triggered some neural pathway in your brain that is totally out of your control and landed on "Titanic".

[slopinthebag]

> You had literally -zero- input in what your brain does

:)

[DangitBobby]

It's how literally everyone thinks. Your thoughts come unbidden via a process you do not understand and cannot observe and your consciousness follows them along. Your brain is not as special as you imagine.

[slopinthebag]

Actually that this happens through our subconscious is incredibly special. Our brains are a marvel.

[DangitBobby]

It's like we have little thinking sub-agents auto-completing cognition tokens in the background that then surface findings to the main agent which then auto-completes some more cognition tokens in the foreground.

[slopinthebag]

Hah thats cute actually

[paradox460]

And if you suppress the stop word, things get funky really fast. Like a Joyce novel

[zzzeek]

Ceci n'est pas une pipe