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Comment by nextts

Mice can survive, forage, reproduce. Reproduce a mammal. There is a whole load of capability not available in an LLM.

An LLM is essentially a search over a compressed dataset with a tiny bit of reasoning as emergent behaviour. Because it is a parrot that is why you get "hallucinations". The search failed (like when you get a bad result in Google) or the lossy compression failed or it's reasoning failed.

Obviously there is a lot of stuff the LLM can find in its searches that are reminiscent of the great intelligence of the people writing for its training data.

The magic trick is impressive because when we judge a human what do we do... an exam? an interview? Someone with a perfect memory can fool many people because most people only acquire memory from tacit knowledge. Most people need to live in Paris to become fluent in French. So we see a robot that has a tiny bit of reasoning and a brilliant memory as a brilliant mind. But this is an illusion.

Here is an example:

User: what is the French Revolution?

Agent: The French Revolution was a period of political and societal change in France which began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the Coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. Many of the revolution's ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy and its values remain central to modern French political discourse.

Can you spot the trick?

parent nextts 1 year ago

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