I work on AI research. I've been trying to explain it to people as an improv actor that takes suggestions from the audience. It just plays along with the prompt you give it. It's not an expert, it's just an actor playing a role.

Ironically, I think you also are overlooking some details about how LLMs work. They are not just word generators. Stuff is going on inside those neural networks that we're still unsure of.

For example, I read about a study a little while back that was testing the mathematical abilities of LLMs. The researchers would give them simple math problems like "2+2=" and the LLM would fill in 4, which was unsurprising because that equation could be found in the LLM's training data. But as they went to higher numbers the LLM kept giving mostly correct results, even when they knew for a fact that the specific math problem being presented wasn't in the training data. After training on enough simple addition problems the LLM had actually "figured out" some of the underlying rules of math and was using those to make its predictions.

Being overly dismissive of this technology is as fallacious as overly hyping it.

I think this is downplaying what LLMs do. Yeah, they are not the best at doing things in general, but the fact that they were able to learn the structure and semantic context of language is quite impressive, even if it doesn't know what the words converted into tokens actually mean. I suspect that we will be able to use LLMs as one part of a full digital "brain", with some model similar to our own prefrontal cortex calling the LLM (and other things like vision model, sound model, etc.) and using its output to reason about a certain task and take an action. That's where I think the hype will be validated, is when you put all these parts we've been working on together and Frankenstein a new and actually intelligent system.

yea, more like: ceos and white collar hurt consumers and workers. those jobs need to be eliminated and corps need to be heavily taxed so that universal basic income becomes ubiquitous. idk if any of this makes sense but i think this how things should be going

Stopping math is never a good idea. By limiting your own constituents, you set their progress back from what other governments' constituents can achieve.

Also, effectively replacing a CEO requires AGI level capabilities. We're closer to that than ever before, but LLMs in their current state aren't it.

The human brain is itself still largely a black box as far as our reasoning capabilities are concerned.

Isn't it called AI because marketing people don't understand the difference?

We should call it: "Algorithmic Intelligence" or A.I. for short.

What do you think "it's an algorithm" is supposed to imply? Can nothing deterministic be considered intelligent?

Also, "designed in a black box" is misleading. It's opaque because it's emergent behavior, not because it was obfuscated or designed in secrecy or something. The algorithm itself is simple. All the interesting data is encoded in the billions to trillions of input parameters. These parameters aren't designed at all, they are learned.

I bet the prison cells and the fines feel all the same, AI or no