> Or you can keep calling them stochastic parrots as they solve decades-old open problems.

I didn't use that phrase at all. But computers calculated digits of π to trillions of digits. With a chat interface for a Python math program would look like the most impressive math genius if you took it back a few decades.

> The real question is how useful they are...

That's not the "real question" but an entirely different question that is easily answered. Nothing I wrote suggested they're not incredibly useful.

> Data from Star Trek TNG failing to understand figures of speech.

These are just little instances of bad writing. Data is very much an attempt at displaying a human-like intelligence.

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Kim_Bruning 2 days ago | parent [-]

> That's not the "real question" but an entirely different question that is easily answered. Nothing I wrote suggested they're not incredibly useful.

Oh, ok then. That does change things a bit. The impression I'm getting is that you were suggesting they're not. What's succinctly the thing you're objecting to?

Is it Anthropomorphization?

I mean, sure, but watch out : when defending on that axis, it's easy to slip into Anthropodenial, right? Frans de Waal (from the same science that invented "Don't Anthropomorphize" ) can tell you about it.

> With a chat interface for a Python math program would look like the most impressive math genius if you took it back a few decades.

Well, exactly. Whether any particular generation of AI or software is yes/no "Like A Human Being" is probably the least interesting question axis. It's all just anthropocentrism.

Is that the thing you're trying to lay your finger on?

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jacobgold a day ago | parent [-]

What I'm pushing back on is, apparently, that some people genuinely believe these LLM-based computer programs are human-like intelligences.

In reality, they're more like very good search engines that output relevant snippets of text. If you run them in a loop (feeding them their output as input) you can make them return even better search results.

The software developers who created these systems used sexy words like "reasoning" and "thinking" to describe this search process. They used words like these because they're trying to make money and it sounds cool, not because they've actually re-created human cognition.

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TeMPOraL a day ago | parent | next [-]

That's the thing - they are more human-like intelligence than search engines. I'm gonna push back on your push-back here strongly. I'm not saying they are intelligent - but they're much more like human-like intelligences than like any kind of classical software systems, which is why it makes more sense to talk and think about them in these terms than as software system.

To do the opposite invites confused thinking like considering "lethal trifecta" a solvable programming problem.

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orangecat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

some people genuinely believe these LLM-based computer programs are human-like intelligences

"If LLMs were human-like intelligences they would do X, but they don't". What is X?

In reality, they're more like very good search engines that output relevant snippets of text.

What are the "relevant snippets" that contained the solutions for the unit distance and Jacobian conjectures?

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SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It seems to me that they used words like these because the LLM-based computer programs they sell can solve problems which humans apply reasoning and thinking to solve. Why do you think it's more than that?

	▲	jacobgold a day ago \| parent [-]
		In the past, when people built programs to extract text from PDFs, they didn't wrap them in a chat interface which claimed it had the human cognitive ability to "read" human languages. They could have done this. They could have claimed they'd recreated human vision and hyped it as the beginning of a full human brain, but they didn't. Instead, they used real technical terms like "OCR" (optical character recognition), which gave people a much more accurate understanding of the technology and didn't encourage silly analogies to humans.