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by chroma_zone 11 days ago
There's a lot of very strong claims made at the start of this article.

(emphasis mine)

> A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge.

> In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries.

> Likewise, the LLM could recognize the face of almost any person, and it could generate any possible human face,

All writings? All of human knowledge in general? Any person??

The example he gives for writing is Shakespeare, which might be one of the most overrepresented writers in the entire training dataset. So yes, of course LLMs can replicate his writings with high accuracy. That doesn't mean that the same applies to literally all of human writings and knowledge.

> We've never had a system to integrate everything we know and everything we can imagine.

Yeah, we still don't.

At first I thought he was just being intentionally hyperbolic for effect, but the rest of the article is even worse. From the closing paragraph:

> We’ll soon depend on this oracle to such an extent that we’ll wonder how we lived without it.

No! AI is not an oracle! That is honestly an extremely dangerous way to think about this technology.

This is the type of baseless hype that OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploiting for years, and I really wish it would stop.

2 comments

Tbh a trivial generative image model could generate any human face, because it could generate any image, just randomly generating pixels is enough.
Can you provide reasons other than "he's wrong"? There is no other technology that compresses so my knowledge into such a small space. A 24 GB diffusion model can generate a good approximation of any human relevant image from a description. Ask it to generate an image of the Tivoli fountain and it will do an impressive job. You can't use it as a map, but it gives an excellent representation.

Finally I don't think there are "dangerous ways" to think of any technology. This is just another tool.

If all that the author was saying was "LLM weights are highly compressed encodings of knowledge", I wouldn't have any complaints. He is making much bolder claims than that.

And if he was describing LLMs as "just another tool", I wouldn't be complaining either.

The onus is not on the commenter. The author made badly qualified statements. Thinking of anything as an oracle is dangerous, an “oracle” is not just another “tool” it’s a religion