I do not believe that LLMs are intelligent. That being said I have no fundamental understanding of how they work. I hear and often regurgitate things like “language prediction” but I want a more specific grasp of whats going on.
I’ve read great articles/posts about the environmental impact of LLMs, their dire economic situation, and their dumbing effects on people/companies/products. But the articles I’ve read that ask questions like “can AI think?” basically just go “well its just language and language isnt the same as thinking so no.” I haven’t been satisfied with this argument.
I guess I’m looking for something that dives deeper into that type of assertion that “LLMs are just language” with a critical lens. (I am not looking for a comprehensive lesson on technical side LLMs because I am not knowledgeable enough for that, some goldy locks zone would be great). If you guys have any resources you would recommend pls lmk thanks
god, the reactions to eliza is such a harbinger of doom. real cassandra moment. it’s an extra weird touchstone for me because we had it on our school computers in the late 90s. the program was called
DOCTORand basically behaved identically to the original, eg find a noun and use it in a sentence. as a 9-year old i found it to be ass, but i’ve only recently learned that some people anthropomorphise everything and can lose themselves totally in “tell me about boats” even if they rationally know what the program is actually doing.as a 30-something with some understanding of natural language processing, eliza is quite nifty.