Comment by lowsong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lowsong | Hacker News Reader

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    It explained something to me today. So your point is disproven.

No. It produced a statistically likely answer.

    What is intelligence then if not explaining things.

"the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason"[0]

LLMs by definition cannot learn, understand, make judgements, or have opinions. If you find the model to be a tool that is useful to you, by all means. But do not anthropomorphize.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/intellig...

You're just talking semantics. To me if I read text that helps me understand something, that's an explanation. The black box it comes from is irrelevant.

LLMs do learn, understand, and make judgments. You're just pushing back on the underlying mechanism, which instead of reason/sentience is instead statistics and weights. I'd call that intelligence but I don't really care if you want to call it something else.

If you believe that an LLM can understand and make judgements then you have fundamentally misunderstood what an LLM is. I'd strongly suggest you read up on the internals.

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