Comment by unshavedyak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unshavedyak | Hacker News Reader

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> Anyone who tells you that these models are "just glorified text generators" is flat out wrong and hasn't bothered to do their homework

What homework.. if i may ask a dumb question?

My very limited understanding was such that this is a glorified text generator - however, it seems what is possible with text generation is allowing unexpected levels of competence and utility. To be clear, i agree with you that it's functionality is impressive and deep. However i had figured one area of research is in the very premise of "How good can LLMs without intelligence be?".

Is that wrong in your view?

(again, i'm not making a statement. I know next to nothing in this space. I just try to reach a layman's understanding on this subject and i use GPT4 daily)

Homework as in:

1. Actually hands on testing the AI to verify that it can't do the things you claim or believe it can't do.

2. Review of the current literature where these LLMs have actually been tested rigorously for various emergent capabilities.

Its rhetorical, as it makes the case that a human is also a glorified text generator. I.e. it's a meaningless statement to say something is a "glorified text generator".

So a highly intelligent AI that produces text is glorified, whatever that means...

It has been shown multiple times that it is incapable of doing math with any consistency. It does not understand numbers, it just knows where numbers usually show up.

> How good can LLMs without intelligence be?

after this LLM breakthrough a lot of smart people started questioning what intelligence really is.

I was extremely skeptical, but after playing with these things and listening to discussions held by their creators, I'm fairly convinced that this is intelligence-adjacent. In the same sense that there must be thoughts an organic brain can't think, there are types of intelligence that don't map exactly onto ours. Vaguely like Feynman's peculiary methods of doing integrals - his method was different, so he could solve things unsolvable by people with standard methods.

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