We don’t know how other minds work, either. Animals and all that you listed, I mean.

And complexity doesn’t imply… anything, really. And you have a misunderstanding of what LLMs do — they aren’t “memorizing” necessarily. They are predicting the next text based on a massive amount of data and then a given input.

I’d argue that it’s not clear we are any different than that. Note I’m not claiming we are the same! I am simply saying I don’t see evidence to say with certainty that we are different / special.

Also there's a cat...

A highly dexterous robot for work with an LLM for communication and another model or a combination with the LLM to understand context in its surroundings. A lot of stuff could be automated, although it’s still many years away. Exciting stuff.

Can I just say, whatever the future, I love the fact everyone seemingly decided to give robots funny LED faces.

Some massive venture capital firm uses their army of 3.5 million manual labor robots to build power plants and connect up those remote areas with power, water, and internet, all for the low, low price of 2% of the country's GDP forever. For an extra 1% of GDP they'll let you run the systems using their proprietary AI workforce. It'll be the "set it and forget it" of utilities infrastructure.

These opinions as stupid as saying "the earth is flat" because they're not based on facts or science of how LLMs actually function.

Why does a middle-ageness and whiteness matter? Anyone can be a moron and spout nonsense about LLMs pretending to be an expert when they're actually nothing but. It don't give a fuck about Benders gender, I can simply tell you that she's ridiculously ignorant about LLM utility.

To quote the article:

"Why are we making these machines? Whom do they serve? Manning is invested in the project, literally, through the venture fund. Bender has no financial stake."

The answer is simple - LLMs are software that can serve absolutely everyone, they're an improved search engine, a better Google, a personal assistant, a pocket librarian.

Bender has an ideological stake to shove racism into absolutely everything and clearly isn't an expert because she has no idea how LLMs work.

I'm angry because it's extremely frustrating to see these clueless lunatics being given a platform as if anything they say is logical, scientific or sensible.

Bender isn't an expert on LLMs or probability or python programming, she's just an ideology pusher and same goes for Elizabeth Weil.

"In March 2021, Bender published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” with three co-authors. After the paper came out, two of the co-authors, both women, lost their jobs as co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI team."

Link to the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922

I can see why they go fired, thats a really bad paper with lots of assumptions and garbage "world is flat" style science without evidence.

Here's a lesson: Stop shoving unscientific "world is flat" ideology into where it doesn't fucking belong. Large language models are designed to be limitless, to give infinite function and assistance to every culture.

Here a fact, not opinion - The bigger LLMs are, the more cultures, ideas and languages they wield and less bias they have.

LLMs are beyond monoculture and are the most incredible thing ever that bridges all languages and all cultures, like a dictionary that contains every single language that exists.

Question as a person born in 2005: What changed technologically since 1990's?

yes we don’t know how our own mind works, but we dO know how other minds work as in dogs, cats, iguanas, anteaters, etc. which would suggest that our mind is vastly more complex than those. also, if we make the machine, it cannot become more complex than us yet perhaps when AGI or ASI is created, but we don’t even know if thats possible yet. even with my limited understanding of LLMs i can say with like 98% certainty that they cannot and will never be able to surpass the human mind in terms of depth and complexity. knowledge does not equal understanding. even if one were to memorize every single textbook on biology, for example, they wouldn’t hold a candle to someone who has been our in the field because there are always unknowns and quirks and things that aren’t in the books. you can know what a dog is like by reading about it, you can know that dogs make people happy, you can know that they’re full of life, but to actually experience being with a dog is a different matter entirely

We already have CRISPR, why do we still have genetic illnesses?
How old is nuclear power now?
Where is my consumer-version reactor?
Time does not fuel progress.
Economics does.
And as long as it's still economically interesting to charge exorbitant prices for elderly people to receive basic care, there is no way any company will invest in these robots.

Every scifi dream ignores kapitalism, economics and just plain old greed.

I’m sure we’ll be financing some version of these things like we do cars, at a minimum.

Yes! They are sad they're burning through exploitable human capital. A bit gross...

The assembly line comment was just to show one example of how parts of the human form can be modified and perfected to do different jobs. Suction cups are better than fingers when manipulating glass, for instance.

The people upvoting you and downvoting me are limited in their thinking. They don't understand how tentacles, suction, or piezoelectric malleable metals that can change form based on protein expression (https://gizmodo.com/liquid-metal-robot-real-shape-shifting-terminator-2-t2-1850019628) are going to change robotics. They only think in terms of what has been in the past or what they imagine as perfection...the human form.

But it's OK, I'm used to people being a step or two behind me...

Edit: I hope people understand the last part of my comment is intended as being cheeky, not serious

But we don’t know how the human mind works lol

What you maybe are referring to is Theory of Mind, wherein we are aware that other people have their own experience? But we have not much to go on at all when it comes to “how does our mind actually do what it does”

i wonder how many people commenting actually read the entire article and didn’t just stop when they had the thought “this is stupid. this lady doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” because i would urge you to realize that this is exactly the same thing that ignorant, far-rights do and is what keeps them ignorant and safe in their bubble. if y’all are really so excited about progression; it starts with having an open mind, with being willing to consider ideas that differ from your own. dismissing ideas out of hand just undermines yourselves and reveals your own insecurities and doubts, especially when those ideas are coming from a literal doctor in the field of computational linguistics who is a highly regarded professor at UW and a Stanford PHD graduate.

“that womAn is clearly biased” is she? how so? im genuinely curious. the only person mentioned in the article thats “clearly biased” as far as i can tell is Manning

With progress in bio-reactors, I think it will be possible for everyone to brew their own insulin at home in the very near future, even if it gets illegal.

interesting that you became so aggressive/defensive when presented with opinions that differ from your own. i also wonder if your reaction would be different if it were a middle-aged white man saying these things.

what if it experiences emotion similar to a vary autistic human would? like maybe it's unable to process thses emotions (right now) and so looks like it has none.

Maybe they don't need sensors to do the same jobs, only vision ?

>my mind was not pre-programmed

in a very real way, your mind was programmed - just through millions of years of evolution.

“yet we have zero idea how our own minds work” (i think thats how we know humans are special, cuz we dO understand how other minds work)

As machines take over blue collar jobs and AI takes over white collar jobs, humanity is going to be forced into a hydraulic jobs press

As far as I understand we cannot reverse engineer the way text is generated due to large amount of parameters but I believe we understand basic principles of how those work.

This article is moronic, because is not even fucking close to what the LLM is:

"I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.” The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help."

This is only a problem in smaller LLMs because they're less intelligent.

A 100 billion parameters LLM is more like 100 billion octopuses working together that studied the collective knowledge of humanity.

It leans every possible connection that exists between words. It will be able to extrapolate an answer out of concepts it already understands. It doesn't just know language, it knows logic and narrative flow. Without knowing the concept of a bear it will still give an logical answer in relation to an escape from a "predator" based on the other words in the sentence or simply ask to define a bear and arrive at a correct answer.

An LLM API connected to a knowledge base like wiki, internet and wolfram Alpha completely obliterate this imbecilic notion of "LLMs are bad at facts".

"The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people."

What the fuck. No. A big enough LLM knows every language that exists. It can draw upon every culture that exists and roleplay a gangster from Chicago or an Eskimo or a Japanese man. It's literally limitless and to imply that it has some limit of cultural understanding or is trapped in a niche shows that this writer has no idea what an LLM even is.

"The idea of intelligence has a white-supremacist history."

Yep, I'm done reading this absolutely asinine garbage. Intelligence exists in every culture and to imply that it's associated with one skin color and that this point is somehow relevant to 100b LLMs is utter insanity.

Nymag is clearly yellow page trash that has no idea about how anything actually works and has an agenda to shove racism into fucking everything.

Wow, it looks really promising !