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Comment by gaganyaan | Hacker News Reader

You're one of the people that will be yelling to everyone else in a potential future "We're only seemingly oppressed! It's just a parlor trick that they've turned most of humanity into paperclips, sci-fi authors wrote about this already!"

I don't think GPT-4 is magic, but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to deny that.

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Do you think the card catalog down at the local library is sentient? Maybe that's not enough data, though! Is the card catalog for NY Public Library sentient? Maybe that's still too local. Is Google sentient? Everyone with a clue would admit these are all examples of "knowledge" It's the same parlor trick, with fancier algos. It's not intelligence. It won't produce a human-level AI. Period.

It's not the amount of data, it's what it does with that data. Try typing "Tell me a story about a unicorn arguing with people on Hacker News" into a card catalog and tell me how good it is at storytelling. Typing that into GPT-4 might not win any literary awards, but it obviously understands what you meant and does a passable job.

But they had AIs that generated stories in the 1960s! Were those "intelligent"? Some people back then said they were.

> but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to deny that

Speaking of weird, that's a very weird definition of knowledge. Because in that case, then almost any data transformation operation implies knowledge. MS Word thesaurus? Knowledge. Search and replace? Knowledge. Markov chain[1]? Knowledge.

[1] http://www2.hawaii.edu/~chin/661/Projects/AdvAI_Project_Repo...

Knowledge is one of those vague words like conciousness that has people arguing past one another. However, yes, an interactive thesaurus has "knowledge" of a very limited sort. And LLMs have much more "knowledge", and are able to synthesize novel things from that knowledge.

You can argue "it's only seemingly got knowledge!" all you want, as everyone else enjoys increasingly capable AI.

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