That was my thought, is model as a computer the best we can do?
Isn’t that limiting our perspective of AIs models to being computers and what computers can’t do, so the model can’t do.
Isn’t that limiting our perspective of AIs models to being computers and what computers can’t do, so the model can’t do.
Nah, there's a better option. Instead of a computer, we could... go for treating it as a person.
Yes, that's inverting the whole point of the article/discussion here, but think about it: the main limitation of a computer is that we have to tell it step-by-step what to do, because it can't figure out what we mean. Well, LLMs can.
Textual chat interface is annoying, particularly the way it works now, but I'd say the models are fundamentally right where they need to be - it's just that a human person doesn't use a single thin pipe of a text chat to communicate with the world; they may converse with others explicitly, but that's augmented by orders of magnitude more of contextual inputs - sights, sounds, smells, feelings, memory, all combining into higher-level memories and observations.
This is what could be the better alternative to "LLM as computer": double down on tools and automatic context management, so the user inputs are merely the small fraction of data that's provided explicitly; everything else, the model should watch on its own. Then it might just be able to reliably Do What I Mean.
AI as an animal we are trying to tame. Why does it have to be a machine metaphor?
Perhaps AI is a ecosystem upon which we all interact at the same time. The author pointed out that the one-on-one interaction is too slow for the AI - perhaps a many-to-one metaphor would be more appropriate.
I agree with the author that we are using the wrong metaphors when interacting with AI but personally I think we should go beyond repeating the mistakes of the past by just extending our current state, I.e. going from a physical desktop to a virtual „desktop“.
Selecting a metaphor implies that ones imagination is - at least partially - constrained by the metaphor. AI as a powerpoint would make using AI for anything other than presentations seem unusual since that what powerpoint is used for.
Also when the original author "models as computers" what does "computer" represent? A mainframe computer the size of small apartment, a smartphone, a laptop, turing machine or some collection of server racks. Even the term "computer" is broad enough to include many forms of interaction. I interact with my smartphone visually while with my server rack textually, yet both are computers.
At least initially, AI seems to be something completely different, almost god-like in its ability to provide us with insightful answers and creative suggestions. God-like meaning that judged from the outside, AI has the ability to provide comforting support in times of need, which is one characteristic of a god-like entity.
Powerpoint wasn't built to be a god-like provider of answers to the most important questions. It would indeed be a surprising if a PP presentation made the same impact as religious scriptures - to thousands/millions of people, not referring to individual experiences.