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> It’s all just physics and chemistry, and those are well understood.

Not really. We cannot model physics and chemistry to a level which allows us to accurately predict a humans action (even a tiny time-step into the future)

This is vastly different to an LLM, where the model is the model (for a lack of better phrasing).

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We can model physics and chemistry pretty well, just not beyond small scales, because the computational effort blows up.

You could just as easily say that if you can write a python interpreter that you can understand every program written in python. Ok, now what if the program is two terabytes?

A frontier LLM is nothing but a 2 terabyte program written in a weird programming language. Just because you can understand the interpreter does not mean you understand the program in a meaningful way.

To be fair, we can't model human language well enough to accurately predict what an actual human will say either. Our ability to accurately model physics is similar to our ability to accurately model human language. And we make immense use of both kinds of model, despite their flaws, inaccuracies, and inability to ever be perfect.

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