Thank jebus there is somebody else in the world who sees this. I was literally playing with a modestly-large dataset Markov-chain based bot more than 25 years ago (yes in the late 90s) trained using data collected from a public chatroom (MOO) and it behaved exactly the same as these LLMs do today. A briefly convincing facsimile of a genuine conversation that quickly wandered off into utter nonsense sprinkled with occasional little nuggets of what seems like intelligence, wit or humor because we interpret it that way. It doesn’t know what the hell it’s saying. It never has.
NONE of the fundamental flaws of the technology have been addressed. It does NOT have intelligence, it is simply a word predictor that, like a broken clock, is right twice a day, and they have just started adding layers and layers of filters on top while asking it over and over behind the scenes until they get a seemingly acceptable answer that passes all the filters. Sometimes that works well, sometimes it works really stupidly. It is random. That’s what randomness does. Given enough computations it will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, but that does not make it a replacement for Shakespeare. It is not intelligent. It is random, and it is a toy.
The only thing it is genuinely useful for is tricking humans into briefly thinking it is intelligent and correct and being pretty surprisingly convincing (which says more about us and our brains than it does about the tech), but the illusion should break eventually (and if it doesn’t you’re in big trouble, because it is still an illusion).
The purveyors of this technology have tricked billions of people using only those features, and gaslit anyone who sees through it as “you’re just not prompting right” or “you’re not using our latest greatest tech that contains even more stolen human-made data it can copy-paste in to look like it knows what it’s talking about” and doing this has supposedly earned them trillions of dollars but it is just a trick. There’s nothing there. The money has been stolen and passed around in circles to inflated its value. There’s nothing there.
I like the term Markov chains in a Chinese room
Thank jebus there is somebody else in the world who sees this. I was literally playing with a modestly-large dataset Markov-chain based bot more than 25 years ago (yes in the late 90s) trained using data collected from a public chatroom (MOO) and it behaved exactly the same as these LLMs do today. A briefly convincing facsimile of a genuine conversation that quickly wandered off into utter nonsense sprinkled with occasional little nuggets of what seems like intelligence, wit or humor because we interpret it that way. It doesn’t know what the hell it’s saying. It never has.
NONE of the fundamental flaws of the technology have been addressed. It does NOT have intelligence, it is simply a word predictor that, like a broken clock, is right twice a day, and they have just started adding layers and layers of filters on top while asking it over and over behind the scenes until they get a seemingly acceptable answer that passes all the filters. Sometimes that works well, sometimes it works really stupidly. It is random. That’s what randomness does. Given enough computations it will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, but that does not make it a replacement for Shakespeare. It is not intelligent. It is random, and it is a toy.
The only thing it is genuinely useful for is tricking humans into briefly thinking it is intelligent and correct and being pretty surprisingly convincing (which says more about us and our brains than it does about the tech), but the illusion should break eventually (and if it doesn’t you’re in big trouble, because it is still an illusion).
The purveyors of this technology have tricked billions of people using only those features, and gaslit anyone who sees through it as “you’re just not prompting right” or “you’re not using our latest greatest tech that contains even more stolen human-made data it can copy-paste in to look like it knows what it’s talking about” and doing this has supposedly earned them trillions of dollars but it is just a trick. There’s nothing there. The money has been stolen and passed around in circles to inflated its value. There’s nothing there.