What does this matter? You can build a working coding agent for yourself extremely quickly; it's remarkably straightforward to do (more people should). But look underneath all the "sprawling tools": the LLM itself is a sprawling maze of matrices. It's all sprawling, it's all crazy, and it's insane what they're capable of doing.

Again if you want to say they're limited in some way, I'm all ears, I'm sure they are. But none of that has anything to do with "statistical text generation". Apparently, a huge chunk of all knowledge work is "statistical text generation". I choose to draw from that the conclusion that the "text generation" part of this is not interesting.

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emp17344 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, hang on a second - it sounds like you may actually disagree with the user who created this thread. That user claims that these systems exhibit “real intelligence”, and success on this Erdos problem is proof.

You seem to be making the claim that LLMs are statistical text generators, but statistical text generation is good enough to succeed in certain cases. Those are different arguments. What do you actually believe? Are we even in disagreement?

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tptacek 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't have any opinion about "real intelligence" or not. I'm not a P(doom)er, I don't think we're on the bring of ascending as a species. But I'm also allergic to arguments like "they're just statistical text generators", because that truly does not capture what these things do or what their capabilities are.

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baxtr 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Just to clarify because I’m not sure I understand:

So you agree that LLMs are in fact statistical text generators but you don’t like people use that fact in arguments about the capabilities of the things?

	▲	Jtarii 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's like a genotype/phenotype distinction, the genotype may be statistical text generator but the phenotype is something much more.
	▲	5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	fc417fc802 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not parent but I think you're being rather dense. They are _obviously_ statistical text generators. There's plenty of source code out there, anyone can go and inspect it and see for themselves so disputing that is akin to disputing the details of basic arithmetic. But it is no longer useful to bring that fact up when conversing about their capabilities. Saying "well it's a statistical text generator so ..." is approximately as useful as saying "well it's made of atoms so ...". There are probably some very niche circumstances under which statements of each of those forms is useful but by and large they are not and you can safely ignore anyone who utters them.

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pepa65 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He does say that LLMs are just a part of the models used these days.