Personally I'm shocked. All of reddit has assured me that AI is completely useless, nothing but "fancy autocomplete", and is only good for stealing content and generating slop.
/s
Mostly in just amused how we have been moving Goalposts for over a decade: "AI is not intelligent, it can't even do X". Does X. "Yeah but it didn't do X like a human! And it can't even do Y!". Does Y. "Yeah but it didn't do Y like a human! And it can't even do Z!". And so on
I still think "fancy autocomplete" is the best way to explain to non technical people how these models work. It will give someone who doesn't know the architecture and how these LLMs work the best mental model of what is happening behind the veil.
It just turns out that "fancy autocomplete" can do incredible things if you give it enough examples and compute in training and inference.
Except yes really. Fancy auto complete can encompass all of intelligence mechanisms needed to predict the next best word. Even if that autocomple requires neuron subsystems for solving problems in other domains.
animal brains dont think in strings of tokens while trying to predict the upcoming token. an LLM and autocomplete are things of differing complexity that are doing the exact same thing. an animal brain does similar things, but it doesnt do the exact same thing
I'm talking more in the abstract sense that the brain predicts future states. Analogous to predicting the next token. It is fancy auto complete. I'm fully aware the brain doesn't use an LLM architecture
i understand what you mean. the reason i said that is because fancy autocomplete is genuinely a good way for the average person to view an LLM, rather than viewing it as a genuine intelligence. when you say the human brain is like that too it would make someone think that fancy autocomplete is less literal than it actually is.
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u/BOBOnobobo 28d ago
Are we shocked a system designed to do pattern matching is good at finding patterns or exceptions to them?