[argee]

Exactly. They ARE "glorified autocomplete" in an ontological sense. That says nothing about capability or outcome. The people who come out swinging against that characterization usually ignore the whole ontological argument (which is...the entire point) and go after an outcome-based strawman.

[ameliaquining]

Isn't the outcomes question the one that people actually care about in most contexts?

[argee]

Depends. "Most" implies majority, and the majority of people are using these tools not for programming but in contexts where ontology is more relevant than capability (not that capability is irrelevant, but most people care, or are tricked into caring, far more about the former).

[ameliaquining]

Sorry, what contexts are these?

[notahacker]

I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend"

Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure.

(tbf I think the "glorified autocomplete" still works surprisingly well for programming outcomes too. Autocomplete [and fuzzy search of reference material] actually is useful and often right and certainly can save time even when it's only suggesting the rest of the variable name. But you might not want to commit everything it suggests...)

[svieira]

My favorite analogy for LLMs is "an intellectual chain saw". It does one thing, well, but that isn't "cut wood". It's "cut". What it cuts will happily include limbs.

[ameliaquining]

Whether an AI's operators lose control of it is an outcomes question.

[argee]

Sorry, this discussion is too incommensurable for me.

[red75prime]

Capability or outcome...or internal structure.

What does "glorified autocomplete" say in an ontological sense exactly? Nah. It's just a lazy dismissal.

BTW, autoregressive pretraining (autocomplete) is a part of training.