davidbalbert

Repeatedly, we’ve thought that humans and animals were different in kind, only to find that we’re actually just different in degree: elephants mourn their dead, dolphins have sex for pleasure, crows make tools (even tools out of multiple non-useful parts! [1]). That could be true here.

LLMs are impressive. Nobody knows whether they will or won’t lead to AGI (if we could even agree on a definition – there’s a lot of No True Scotsman in that conversation). My uneducated guess is that that you’re probably right: just continuing to scale LLMs without other advancements won’t get us there.

But I wish we were all more humble about this. There’s been a lot of interesting emergent behavior with these systems, and we just don’t know what will happen.

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  struct foo {
   uintptr_t p __attribute__((xnu_usage_semantics("pointer")));
  };
  
  int main() {
   struct foo f = { 100 };
  
   printf("%lu\n", f.p);
   return 0;
  }

> Fun aside: I’ve always assumed this is why Core Foundation exists—to provide a common interface between Carbon and Cocoa. I don’t actually have a citation for this, though.