People on Twitter are speculating breathlessly about using this for social science. I don't immediately see uses for it outside of fiction, esp. video games.
It would be cool if some kind of law of large numbers (an LLN for LLMs) implied that the decisions made by a thing trained on the internet will be distributed like human decisions. But the internet seems a very biased sample. Reporters (rightly) mostly write about problems. People argue endlessly about dumb things. Fiction is driven by unreasonably evil characters and unusually intense problems. Few people elaborate the logic of ordinary common sense, because why would they? The edge cases are what deserve attention.
A close model of a society will need a close model of beliefs, preferences and material conditions. Closely modeling any one of those is far, far beyond us.
It would be cool if some kind of law of large numbers (an LLN for LLMs) implied that the decisions made by a thing trained on the internet will be distributed like human decisions. But the internet seems a very biased sample. Reporters (rightly) mostly write about problems. People argue endlessly about dumb things. Fiction is driven by unreasonably evil characters and unusually intense problems. Few people elaborate the logic of ordinary common sense, because why would they? The edge cases are what deserve attention.
A close model of a society will need a close model of beliefs, preferences and material conditions. Closely modeling any one of those is far, far beyond us.