Change My View

Parallelism was a big deal several times before this boom, and what they lacked vis-a-vis neural networks is differentiable activation functions. That's why OCR was a thing for ages but Not Hotdog was recent and sudden.

No kidding this is the world's most obvious bubble. And yet: the tech does the thing. You can in fact generate photorealistic video, in seconds, on consumer hardware, even if all you have is a description. Three years ago "Will Smith eating spaghetti" produced amusingly shite gloopy nonsense. As of a year ago all you could nitpick was the shape of his chin. Five years ago the cutting edge bragged about icon-sized images of an avocado chair. Everything has moved at a breakneck pace, and will continue grinding forward after whatever fresh hell follows several predictable collapses.

In LLMs specifically, they're still dumb, but they're smart enough that we can say they're dumb. They have a measurable IQ. These chatbots vastly exceed anything made through human cleverness alone, and they've disproved many assertions that a computer could never [blank] unless it was truly conscious. Simply typing 'rewrite this in Rust' might Just Work and provide significant performance benefits. Like compilers slowly obviating assembly hackers, we have to contend with the rising capabilities of software that writes software.

I worry about how many people are letting themselves get caught up in the fantasy that there is some sort of intelligence in this high speed Chinese room.

John Searle was a troll. The Chinese Room should never be taken seriously, because he pointed at a hard drive and said "processor." Demanding a blind idiot instruction-follower must understand the whole intent of the software happening to it... is just Cartesian dualism. Except instead of a soul, you get a Steve, and he better be paying attention! If he gets the same results while zoning out, they don't count. As if some guy emulating a calculator app would follow the low-level floating-point bit-banging necessary to find the area of a circle.

Sorry. Pet peeve.

We do need to distinguish intelligence, comprehension, consciousness, and sapience. LLMs definitely aren't alive, in any sense. But saying they lack all intelligence veers toward saying calculators only simulate math. Intelligence is a process, and if it's necessary for certain observed decisions in humans... we also observe those decisions in some models. Like figuring out you can't walk to a car wash.

I cannot get excited over yet another moral panic where kids these days have a crutch for... whatever. The internet, calculators, slide rules, the printing press, the written word. Some little shits are always giving teachers a hard time. Surely they're still routinely judged with nothing but pencil and paper in a silent room.