>Since Nov 30, 2022 BC everything has become… more complex.

FTFY

Increasing complexity is the story of mankind. It's the story of civilization.

Someone from 20,000 BC would wander around the earth trying to find food, trying not to freeze, and trying not to get eaten. Someone from 5,000 BC would be trying to grow food, hoping it rains, and hoping disease didn't wipe out the village. The second one increases the complexity from all the systems required to manage people and keep the land growing. Today the vast majority of people on earth don't grow their own food at all, and instead are busy in some way managing the complexity of a large society.

Someone from 1970-80 would think our software from pre-llm days was vastly more complex. They'd just code directly to the hardware with no abstraction layer. Now almost no one does that. We abstracted the hardware away in most cases. With cryptography libraries for the vast majority of people it's complexity is abstracted away and mostly people are told "don't try to write your own crypto because you will fuck it up".

The question now becomes, how quickly will LLMs be able to coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing?

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qsera 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>LLMs be able to coordinate their understanding

I think the next time I see "LLMs" and "Understanding" in the same sentence, I am going to lose it....

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>I am going to lose it

Then I think you should check in with your favorite mental health provider before you become a danger to yourself or others.

Simply put LLMs do understand some things within their crystalized intelligence. Your anthropocentric mind may not accept this, but one day it will. As LLMs have a very short context window in relation to their stored knowledge they have very limited plastic intelligence to change their minds or adapt. All of which is flushed away at the end of a session. It would be like living without the ability to turn your short term memory into new long term memories.

I would gladly use another word for what LLMs can do, but the world at large has not adopted any. The definitions we use around intelligence, comprehension, understanding, consciousness, and sapitence have already been failing us for some time before LLMs as our scientific understanding of biology has increased over the decades as it is. I am one for more exacting definitions when they exist, but humans seem to barely understand the inner workings of our own minds, in large such words escape us.

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irishcoffee an hour ago | parent [-]

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable.

An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a cookie.

	▲	pixl97 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I believe you've made a category error in understanding, um, understanding. You've tied emotion into it. This to me are entirely different concepts where both happen to be wrapped up in meaty flesh that drives us humans. Now, these concepts are very important in sociology and human understanding of how we behave, but they also may have zero importance for the domain that encompases all understanding. HN would commonly recommend reading the book Blindsight here. Moreso, all you've done is recreate the Searle Chinese Room thought experiment which gets bounced around with no means of deciding if it reflects reality or not.
	▲	CamperBob2 36 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. How'd your toddler do at IMO last year?

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a2dam an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You should be less upset over semantics that everyone else has usefully settled on. LLMs understand things fine.

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ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> IBM has entered the chat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)