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points by delichon 5 days ago | 0 comments

> ...imply ... a sort of transcendental introspection into their own brains, which if true would be absolutely groundbreaking.

> but ... it's bog standard reverse engineering, like any human would do, just vastly faster

For some values of vastly faster these are functionally equivalent and so equivalently groundbreaking.

[–] simias 4 days ago

Arguing that LLMs spontaneously evolve new capabilities outside of their training set (being able to naturally interpret weights and manipulate them to change their function) is a completely different proposition from being able to pattern-match Pac Man really fast from a pseudo-graphical representation (which is what they actually do here).

It's like ChatGPT coming up with a brand new brownie recipe that's surprisingly good vs. coming up with a working design for a cold fusion reactor.

Yeah the brownie is cool, but it's not that cool.

[–] batshit_beaver 5 days ago

If faster intelligence was “groundbreaking” we would still be worshipping pocket calculators.

[–] youareundersell 5 days ago

If by "pocket calculator" you mean linear algebra machines that do our work, then yes, we are doing that.

[–] batshit_beaver 4 days ago

I’m personally a huge fan of viewing LLMs as linear algebra machines. They seem a lot less fascinating when you do that.

[–] CamperBob2 4 days ago

What's an alternative to the more complete, correct description, "Linear algebra machines that can learn nonlinear functions?"

Witchcraft?

[–] batshit_beaver 4 days ago

AGI

[–] CamperBob2 4 days ago

I'm upping my P(doom)...