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They are remarkably useful. Of course there are dangers relating to how they are used, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending they are useless accomplishes nothing.
They are remarkably useful. Of course there are dangers relating to how they are used, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending they are useless accomplishes nothing.
It models only use of language
This phrase, so casually deployed, is doing some seriously heavy lifting. Lanuage is by no means a trivial thing for a computer to meaningfully interpret, and the fact that LLMs do it so well is way more impressive than a casual observer might think.
If you look at earlier procedural attempts to interpret language programmatically, you will see that time and again, the developers get stopped in their tracks because in order to understand a sentence, you need to understand the universe - or at the least a particular corner of it. For example, given the sentence “The stolen painting was found by a tree”, you need to know what a tree is in order to interpret this correctly.
You can’t really use language *unless* you have a model of the universe.
they, in fact, will have some understanding
These models have spontaneously acquired a concept of things like perspective, scale and lighting, which you can argue is already an understanding of 3D space.
What they do not have (and IMO won’t ever have) is consciousness. The fact we have created machines that have understanding of the universe without consciousness is very interesting to me. It’s very illuminating on the subject of what consciousness is, by providing a new example of what it is not.
They absolutely do contain a model of the universe which their answers must conform to. When an LLM hallucinates, it is creating a new answer which fits its internal model.
I think it’s possible that internal language did exist before it could be vocalised. That is, before we evolved the necessary structures in the throat to make words, we were thinking according to basic grammatical rules e.g subject-verb-object. Words in human language are like labels for internal concepts, and those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing.
What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.
ah they were making a nice and lame pun (anova brand == another brand)