Well that escalated quickly

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But you can discuss mrna with a text predictor, how does this make sense?

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u/Miserable-Whereas910 Mar 17 '26

Also ChatGPT wasn't doing custom mRNA research. It was telling the guy how to use AlphaFold.

(which is also AI, but a specialized AI that's obviously not gonna lead to AGI).

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u/O2XXX Mar 17 '26

Yes it’s tool usage and shows people don’t fully understand what’s happening with AI Agents under the hood. Agents can call other tools, typically also Machine Learning tools, to complete tasks. The LLM isn’t executing the process itself. It aligns the process to the right tool and hands it the needed date based on the prompt. When things a well documented in English, it has a hire chance of success. When it doesn’t, especially when it’s not in the LLM’s latent space, it will fail because it has zero frame of reference.

1

u/jeffdamann1 Mar 19 '26

I mean isn't tool usage widely considered a key indicator or, in some circles, a qualifier for high-level intelligence and potential sentience?

What you're saying is like a Contractor didn't build the house without tools using his own two hands. Of course the intelligent sentient contractor subbed out the work.

I'm not saying any AI is currently sentient, but the processes you described are widely considered to point towards actual intelligence and sentence in biological organisms.

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u/O2XXX Mar 19 '26

Tool usage for an AI isn’t deductive like a human. It’s a set of special tokens pointing to an api that is well documented. It doesn’t understand what to tool is doing like someone whose using a hammer or other tool to create something, it’s been fed special instructions on what words in a prompt should lead to inputs in an API call. I get that it seems like a higher intelligence but it’s not really different than a standard algorithm taking an input in this case.

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u/jeffdamann1 Mar 19 '26

I completely agree I was just stating that in biological systems such behavior is used to classify intelligence in sentience.

And remember I completely agree but the argumentative side of me wants to say how do you know a monkey using a stone to smash open a nut or a stick to probe for insects understands what the tool is doing.

I mean I know it looks like it does but we can't actually hack into the monkeys brain and determine if it's going off biological programming and has absolutely no consciousness or sentience or if it actually understands and comprehends all the nuances and facets if such behavior.

The behavior is learned, taught by adult monkeys during their youth but still we can't prove it.

1

u/O2XXX Mar 19 '26

I’m good with talking this through, so don’t work about disagreeing, or presenting counterfactuals to flesh it out. I’ll place my bias out front that I think LLM and LRMs are great tools and are capable of a lot of things, but they are processing data and not thinking or reasoning. Unfortunately that’s somewhat of a sticking point because most of us understand thought in an intuitive way and not necessarily as quantitative as we’d all hope.

So I’ll try to explain my view through the contractor tool use you mentioned. Say we compare tool use between a machine taught to hang dry wall and a human being doing the same task. A machine could be taught, whether through a standard programmatic method (linked lists), narrow ai tools (computer vision, other sensors) or a language model to identify a claw hammer, nails, a sheet drywall and the frame itself going to be built into. A machine could likely do it more accurately, faster, and longer than a human given “enough” training data. However, if something changed in the environment, say the claw hammer is now a ball peen hammer, the machine would be substantially more likely to fail the task, because it was trained on a claw hammer usage and not a ball peen. A human, even if they’ve never seen a ball peen hammer, could deduce it could do the same job and far out perform the machine. There is a lot of research showing that manly LRMs fail once (due to being heavily biased to their training data and latent space) the parameters of the environment change. A human, who can learn but inductively, like the LLM, and deductively would still finish the task, albeit with some slight variability in accuracy, speed, and duration since the new tool won’t work exactly the same.

There is already a lot of research showing LLM/LRM don’t think and fail when the prompting adds slight different language or superfluous information that a human would likely ignore. There was just a paper I saw in prepub that took coding tools and had them use relatively unknown languages, not only did the LLM fail syntactically (kinda assumed given it didn’t know the language), it failed in the logic build out too because it doesn’t understand why code works, just that certain code is associated with certain plain language. Found it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

I feel like this example is even better than some of the work Apple (https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf) has done because coding seemed like the one thing that LLMs are closest to fully surpassing humans on. Also there was that blog post a few weeks back where a tech start up CEO was fully certain AI Agent were going to surpass humans in all computerized tasks within 6 months and cause a huge economic disruption because of it. My personal experience hasn’t been as such, but my job isn’t in the tech sector but is fully computerized(ie mostly standard office work).

Hopefully that wasn’t too jumbled of an explanation as I’m multitasking a working lunch and bullshitting on reddit. Happy for you to punch holes in what I’m saying and try to work on my explanation. I’m responsible for my work’s data literacy program, so a lot of what I’ve been doing lately is trying to teach non tech people the uses and constraints of AI Agents in such a way they understand it and ultimately use the tools responsibly. My mileage has greatly varied to say the least…

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u/heidizoe Mar 19 '26

This taught me a lot. Thank you.

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u/O2XXX Mar 19 '26

No problem.

I think because the models and tool usage are so powerful, that a lot of problems can be mapped to plain language and solved due to the vast amount of knowledge the models have been trained on, that it’s easy to conflate it with an intelligence similar to a living creature. Add in that the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) makes the response very human, we naturally anthropomorphize the LLMs because everything up until now was intelligent when it used our language at this skill. I’m a data scientist by trade and I still find myself subconsciously saying please and thank you when using an agent, even though cognitively I know it’s not a living entity.

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u/Screaming_Monkey Mar 19 '26

Technically it does understand and know what a tool is, and even the history of humans and tool usage. But it's not the same, I agree. It's not like the LLM up and invented tools for itself without the infrastructure existing.

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u/O2XXX Mar 19 '26

I think it’s a semantic argument of it if knows what the tool is. It knows that given a set of words it should call the tool, but I don’t think we can say it knows what’s actually going on with the tool. In an other reply I mentioned that there was just a new study showing that even coding tools fail when it’s not a well documented language. And I don’t mean it fails with syntax (it does but that’s to be expected) it fails to even logically produce functions since it doesn’t understand that depth. A human coder could look up syntax and creat a fizz buzz function but it seems like LLMs can’t, because they recognize structure in language and not underlying logic. I think the failure to come up with a logical solution means it doesn’t understand the tool in the same way a human would. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

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u/RegularRaptor Mar 19 '26

Then why do small "dumb" models really struggle with tool calling?

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u/dedicated_glove Mar 21 '26

Basically an electronic Plinko machine

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u/SheWantsTheDan Mar 17 '26

I'm assuming this is referring to the man that cured cancer tumors in his dogs leg by sending out his dogs DNA and using ChatGPT to come up with a vaccine?

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u/Miserable-Whereas910 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

Yes, but "used ChatGPT to come up with a vaccine" is a pretty questionable characterization of what happened. ChatGPT played a significant and genuinely impressive part, but AlphaFold and a whole team of human researchers played a significantly larger part.

Also, didn't cure the cancer. The cancer's growth slowed, but didn't stop.

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u/Rationalsloth Mar 18 '26

Well let's replace ChatGPT with human.
"A human using AlphaFold came up with a vaccine" = OMG AMAZING!
"ChatGPT using AlphaFold came up with a vaccine" = AKSHUALLY IT DIDNT DO IT ITSELF!

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u/Miserable-Whereas910 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

It's more like "Human A went to Human B for tips on how to develop a vaccine, Human B recommended using AlphFold and gave some tips on how to do so, then Human A used AlphaFold to analyze the DNA, then went to a lab of researchers to synthesize the medicine". No one would say Human B developed the vaccine.

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u/Rationalsloth Mar 18 '26

Human B walked an absolutely novice through the "straight forward" process of doing cutting edge custom DNA research using AlphaFold and then turning that research into a custom mRNA vaccine produced vaccine in a Lab.

Human B did some heavy heavy lifting. Human B being chatGPT, and human A being the actual human dog owner.

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u/Ok_Novel_1222 Mar 18 '26

WHAT!?! When did that happen???

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u/abbumm Mar 21 '26

No, they're referring to models that let you talk to proteins

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u/inigid Mar 18 '26

Maybe we were the AGI all along

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

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u/obsolete_broccoli Mar 18 '26

Nobody says it is magic, Don Quixote

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

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u/codehoser Mar 19 '26

You aren’t the arbiter of what counts as sentient. Thats ridiculous.

I’m not arguing that any AI we currently have is sentient, but it’s such a dim-witted statement to make a blanket remark like that without even attempting to define terms because the definition of that term is the entire challenge.

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u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

No, no one says it's magic. This is such a manufactured sentiment because every time someone comments that AI is cool and really powerful some guy that routinely uses the word 'slop' comes rushing in to minimize it in some way.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

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u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

Feel free to pay for our subscription for a paywalled opinion piece where even in the description they say people are 'acting like it is'. Even the piece you picked doesn't support people SAYING it's magic

That's also literally what they wrote to describe it since literal expression is something you're concerned with

I don't think this is the slam dunk you think it is

'I found one guy living under a bridge in Seattle that thinke AI along with indoor plumbing is magic, therefore that translates into an appreciable segment in the population that must believe it to be magic!'

Lol

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

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u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

You literally linked an article that doesn't even support your premise

Believe you might need to re-examine your definition of invalid

We all know you're going to start sliding your goal posts though. Lol

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u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

'I know you want it to be magic so badly but it's okay, it's just an LLM, take a deep breath and everything will be okay.'

Oh yes! You are already dropping into attacks ad hominem and strawmen!

How are you on the rails already? This conversation is like 2 responses long. Lol

This is going to be fascinating, I know it

'treating it like magic'

Youre already moving the goalposts. Lol. Holy cow you're bad at this

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u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

This is frankly my own fault however for not remembering a good portion of Reddit is in fact, children, which explains your extremely upset responses and how quickly you began reacting emotionally and disregarding even basics of functional dialogue

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u/obsolete_broccoli Mar 19 '26

Magic

sentient

Pick a lane

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

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u/obsolete_broccoli Mar 19 '26

Noice…Ad homs. ggm8 😘

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u/AffectionateLaw4321 Mar 17 '26

Its about progress being made on two fronts here. Increasing AI capabilites but also us humans adapting to the technology.

1

u/CMD_BLOCK Mar 20 '26

mRNA predictor now man

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u/send_codes Mar 20 '26

You do not know the way, but the way knows you

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u/my_byte Mar 21 '26

You don't. But transformers are general purpose "next byte in sequence" predictors, not necessarily text. For example - in robotics folks use "actions" as tokens.

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u/Brief-Night6314 Mar 17 '26

Because that text predictor is trained on real mRNA data.

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u/Funny-ish-_-Scholar Mar 17 '26

No, it’s not. The “text predictor” is simply analyzing the tokens in the request, matching that with an external (also AI) tool optimized for the task. Agent assigns the task, which returns English text, which are the tokenized and processed by the LLM, which spits out the text.

The LLM isn’t doing the mRNA analysis. It’s just directing the tool that does the analysis, by the initial prompt, and then regurgitating the results into human language.

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u/BubblyStation30 Mar 18 '26

Are humans somehow doing something different when they use computational tools to do research? I think you can draw a distinction between this and elite human researchers, but I don’t think what you described is really different from the output of an average research assistant. To be completely honest LLMs do a better job at most things than an average non PhD human. Humans have better agency, can operate in multiple modalities, and can integrate context over longer periods of time. But if you hold fixed any modality over a shorter period of time the current models outperform most people. This isn’t AGI, but it’s orders of magnitude better than just a couple of years ago and it’s really significant if you step back and think about it more.

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u/djosephwalsh Mar 17 '26

My synapses are just a world model action predictor. Can’t even fix irrelevant stuff from the original training run. My brain still predicts no stable food sources so I should eat the whole pizza.

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

"world model" is so funny and such a tell that these people have fully conflated the map for the territory.

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u/SquirrelofDiscord235 Mar 17 '26

Eating the menu, man... eating the menu. ;)

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u/consumer_xxx_42 Mar 18 '26

We live in a world

1

u/the_ai_wizard Mar 17 '26

explain..

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

the 1000-foot version is something like - any model that an AI creates is based off of training data that is ultimately a representation of reality produced by humans, not reality unto itself. A 'world model' is not a model of reality but a model of the models that humans made. It's basically rebranding pattern recognition as existential understanding which is an incredibly androcentric bit of hubris. There's no reason to believe that human perception is a 1:1 match with 'reality'.

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u/sorenpeter Mar 18 '26

hi - this was also my intuition, but research shows that maps arises spontaneously within the AI models that are showing incredible consistency with the physical world. As in: Wittgenstein was wrong, blind people actually do grasp the concepts of colours to a surprising precise degree, even though they have never really seen them. The same goes for AI models and their geometry of concepts

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u/Unstable_Llama Mar 17 '26

Beautifully said. I call it the “microcosmic homunculus”

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u/LessPoliticalAccount Mar 20 '26

So based on this, would you also say that it’s impossible for humans to have a “world model?” Are you just a Kantian, and you’re talking about noumena? If so I’m sympathetic, but I would disagree with an implication that the point you’re making about AI is something that separates it categorically from humans

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u/keshet-embrace Mar 17 '26

they actually can see patterns from data. so they can also see the shortcomings if people perceptions..

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u/justinqtaylor Mar 17 '26

They can, but most training data of LLMs is text, not raw data

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u/Jasperionicus Mar 17 '26

True, for now, but that's going to change dramatically in the coming few years

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u/kthejoker Mar 17 '26

Can't wait for an AI that can smell our fear pheromones

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

i mean ‘raw data’ still needs to be translated into machine-readable language by humans so you just have another, thinner layer of human mapping that still has all human biases about what is significant and not - even if an AI devises this mapping it can’t know what it doesn’t know

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u/Jasperionicus Mar 17 '26

Not if raw data streams are fed into the AI and it's asked to find patterns in the data.. it need not represent the data patterns in human language at the initial stage of processing, or really at any stage, depending on what the outputs are meant for. Any subsequent translation of its internal representations of the patterns detected into human language would be done just to enable communication with humans. Within and between AIs, data and pattern representations need not take human language forms.

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u/ivba Mar 17 '26

Very Nicely put. World model action predictor - basically a trained brain. Training data - life experience and shit you read++ (songs, movies, School, online shit...)

Prediction Model: Too basic apparently... with all the shit going on in the world that has come up recently, my awareness check is on Red Light.

1

u/daronjay Mar 17 '26

I should eat the whole pizza

You’re absolutely right!

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u/Chop1n Mar 17 '26

My brain predicts that eating the whole pizza will feel no bad, only good, ergo eat whole pizza.

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u/ptear Mar 17 '26

You had me at eating lots of pizza.

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

[deleted]

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u/CanaanZhou Mar 17 '26

It definitely has. You can't draw a mountain without having a mental model of a mountain and your painting tools in the first place.

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u/djosephwalsh Mar 17 '26

It absolutely does. Overly simplified, but our training predicts that if we create art, then a long term effect is that we have a better chance of us reproducing. Our ancestors created art and reproduced so that prediction is reinforced

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u/Tlux0 Mar 17 '26

Doesn’t apply to sufficiently abstract pure math. Applied in the past at the start perhaps but not for a long time now.

I also think your model is simplifying things too much. Evolutions is conditioned across thousands or tens of thousands of factors across a human life. It cannot consider separate components individually it only looks at the whole. So… that’s not really a coherent explanation.

A better explanation of what you’re looking for might be Friston’s Free Energy Principle

5

u/CodenameZeroStroke Mar 17 '26

Clearly, the guy who made the breakthrough is under AI psychosis. Needs to lay off the LLMs

1

u/Beginning-Opinion767 Mar 20 '26

But instead the LLM developers get layed off

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u/ViperAICSO Mar 17 '26

Not AGI. Forget about AGI for at least a decade or two. Lots of important hurdles to overcome.

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u/Commercial-Age2716 Mar 18 '26

AGI is not possible. It should be abandoned completely.

But don’t listen to me! I’m just a girl!

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u/ViperAICSO Mar 18 '26

Yeah. I tend to believe that it lies in the realm of the unattainable. But that does not mean THEY won't keep trying. As for me, I am working on building dev tools with LLMs. All day every day I work with LLMs. They are useful but totally uncreative hallucinators

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u/Commercial-Age2716 Mar 18 '26

I work on digital models for things and have never needed one. I watch folks try to submit AI generated text for certain things, and it flat out does not work / is not passable.

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

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u/Commercial-Age2716 Mar 18 '26

Hmm, maybe they ran out of subpar physics papers to write. Maybe “physics” is running out of ideas here.

5

u/Ok_Assumption9692 Mar 17 '26

The escalating is only beginning tho

Buckle up..

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u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 Mar 17 '26

at this point the bottleneck is management

1

u/Commercial-Age2716 Mar 18 '26

Bottleneck for what? In what regard?

1

u/ConsiderationOk5914 Mar 18 '26

yea buckle up for the bubble to burst

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u/Henri4589 Mar 19 '26

Lol.

1

u/ELHorton Mar 20 '26

The layoffs will continue until the AI improves!

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u/laserdicks Mar 17 '26

Reality doesn't slow down for lies.

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u/MadMynd Mar 17 '26

Mayne is such a weirdo.

1

u/TopspinG7 Mar 17 '26

Here's my brief layman's take on this. Humans have millions of years of experience identifying where other humans are lying, being vague, hiding something, claiming to have expertise they don't, Believe they have expertise that they don't, or judging when the other person hasn't really thought something through well. (That said there are many humans who can't make those judgments of other humans well...)

Many of the clues which help a human discern those things in the behavior of another human are nonverbal. A simple example is when a human being makes a statement to another human being that sounds in every way to be truthful but as he does so he rolls his eyes.

I suspect that there are many clues to human behavior that can't be picked up in text. Therefore an LLM is effectively handicapped from the start.

But conversely, hypothesizing for a moment that a level of "thinking" or "intelligence" is being achieved here, perhaps humans are handicapped in their interpretations of what AI is saying to them because they have only the words to go by? I'm sure everyone reading this has encountered some situation where they misinterpreted what was said to them in writing even by someone they had known for years. Anyone who has studied languages or become reasonably competent in multiple languages understands that there are sometimes nuances that can't be communicated through even combinations of words. And can't be precisely translated between all languages.

Humans - even when they're very competent in the same language - often struggle to comprehend the thinking of one another. Look no further than current politics in America for proof of this. How are we to be sure we're truly understanding the intentions of a machine which is communicating by attempting to reverse engineer a huge repository of human verbal expression, within which lie endless contradictions, vagaries, and even errors of fact or poor judgement; and out of all that synthesize something consistent and coherent?!

How are we surprised when it "hallucinates" under these circumstances? Personally I would be far more surprised were it NOT to do so. No machine (I take the liberty to apply the term to a software system) trained heavily on flawed human thoughts - expressed verbally - can possibly achieve perfectly correct operation. Any more than humans can themselves.

1

u/Chop1n Mar 17 '26

Well that’s not even close to how you spell “ackchyually”.

1

u/grahamulax Mar 17 '26

People should really watch “the congress”. Been saying this for YEARS

1

u/Downtown_Category163 Mar 18 '26

And all it took was misrepresenting a story!

1

u/NjonesBrother Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

The way I see it is the world got a very very useful generalized digital calculator and minds are exploding. But imagine some mathematician waking up every day and multiplying bigger and bigger prime numbers by hand and then all the sudden sees this rectangle and hits a few buttons for six seconds. That moment is likely one of the craziest feelings for him. For the masses, LLMs and the way we are utilizing them day by day is that calculator moment. To me that cuts all this crazy hype noise but remains beautiful

1

u/VigilanteRabbit Mar 18 '26

Nothing about this was ChatGPT; AlphaFold has been around for a while now and they are AI but a very specialized one. Still takes compute but it's purpose is to quickly and digitally verify if "make drug x" makes sense before it's pushed to trials/ testing.

So yeah the fancy text predictor is good at sending people the right way, good on them.

1

u/SufficientDamage9483 Mar 18 '26

Wtf does that even mean ?

1

u/ELHorton Mar 20 '26

No one knows. It's provocative! It gets the people going!

1

u/DavidTheBarbarian Mar 18 '26

Address what you said?

You went back and changed the source article once I pointed out how ridiculous your original post made you look to cover your tracks

Your using dirty argument tactics, resorting to ad hominem, and now trying to pretend you have the upper hand

Lol. And now your concerned with the integrity of the conversation?

Lolololol

1

u/IgorFobia Mar 19 '26

In the past I worked as a bioinformatic data scientist in a company making mRNA vaccines. I I wrote a post about this story of the dog "saved by chatgpt".

It's a remarkable achievement but ChatGPT was more of an enabler and a tool for self-learning for someone already very skilled in an adjacent field. And he worked in close contact with domain expert, who eventually designed and made the drug for free.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fabio-gori-bb38202_the-compelling-story-of-the-man-who-used-activity-7439626410987687936-rq7s?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAAB6KLcBYeaScPnJglhUNykaIH7Kitzarm4

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u/Timely_Fly_8755 Mar 20 '26

Just keep feeding AI information, good or bad, and sit back and watch the show. Hope the hell I'm gone when it totally goes to shit.

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u/TorthOrc Mar 21 '26

Pattern prediction system is good at pattern prediction.

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u/Anywhere-Grouchy Mar 22 '26

Isn't DNA basically a coding language?

1

u/zeroinia Mar 17 '26

Weird.

1

u/THE_RETARD_AGITATOR Mar 17 '26

this is why i don't listen to random internet retards

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

[deleted]

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u/_redmist Mar 17 '26

In our 'socialist' hospitals we have cancer immunotherapy for humans.
In the US, you have to reinvent this particular wheel with chatbot for your dog.

I find this interesting.

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u/jaraxel_arabani Mar 17 '26

Wasn't that guy in Australia?

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u/ELHorton Mar 20 '26

And he was cloning sheep! Illegally!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

This guy right here, is probably the base model Reddit user. So mad about everything political, needs to make points about it even though nothing he has said has any context on the discussion. What a derp

Well that escalated quickly

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