In computing we use analogies everywhere: stack, bus, web, garbage collector, parent, container, ...
Master became somewhat controversial recently, but overall the main risk our liberal repurposing of terms introduces is that we sometimes follow the "wrong" idea and design a machine that doesn't do what it ought to, or is unnecessarily complicated, that we develop systems (and documentation etc) that are inefficient if not dumb.
In adopting "thought" terminology and other analogies to psychological processes I fear we'll not just misunderstand this technology and how it works, but also degrade the rigour of machine science, damaging our credibility and misleading the public as well.
Nobody will ever make the mistake of supposing that "rehydrating" a data structure involves water, or that busy beaver machines are living beings. But the language coming out of the LLM field in particular causes these problems immediately, and they are extreme -- scientists and engineers themselves have trouble telling if it's supposed to be an analogy or not.
Master became somewhat controversial recently, but overall the main risk our liberal repurposing of terms introduces is that we sometimes follow the "wrong" idea and design a machine that doesn't do what it ought to, or is unnecessarily complicated, that we develop systems (and documentation etc) that are inefficient if not dumb.
In adopting "thought" terminology and other analogies to psychological processes I fear we'll not just misunderstand this technology and how it works, but also degrade the rigour of machine science, damaging our credibility and misleading the public as well.
Nobody will ever make the mistake of supposing that "rehydrating" a data structure involves water, or that busy beaver machines are living beings. But the language coming out of the LLM field in particular causes these problems immediately, and they are extreme -- scientists and engineers themselves have trouble telling if it's supposed to be an analogy or not.