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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. LLM's are a language model math formulas that interpret and utilize big-data. Take away the math formulas and we are just back to a massive set of data. Adding to that I would suggest not even the purist forms of data meaning that the data-sets include knowledge from the open and anonymous internet and formulaic tuning from the AI owners and operators.

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Your brain is mostly just a Principal Component Analysis calculator. Take away that "math formula" and you don't have intelligence either.

The LLM weights are not intelligent. But if you give an agent a mutable memory store and allow it to iterate, it is obviously intelligent. Not massively - it's constrained by the context window - but definitely somewhat.

The confusing thing is that their language ability far outpaces their true intelligence, and humans aren't used to that. Normally those things are highly correlated, so it tricks us.

Right. But at their core they are math formulas devised by a process designed to produce mimicry of task completion. The math formulas themselves aren’t fully effable. We’re sure studying the heck out of how they complete the tasks! Bet they converged on how we do it, since it’s our language, but who knows.

If you want to talk about whether LLMs are intelligent, you have to define intelligence. "They're just math formulae" isn't a definition of intelligence.

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