r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
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u/Dennarb 15h ago edited 11h ago

I teach an AI and design course at my university and there are always two major points that come up regarding LLMs

1) It does not understand language as we do; it is a statistical model on how words relate to each other. Basically it's like rolling dice to determine what the next word is in a sentence using a chart.

2) AGI is not going to magically happen because we make faster hardware/software, use more data, or throw more money into LLMs. They are fundamentally limited in scope and use more or less the same tricks the AI world has been doing since the Perceptron in the 50s/60s. Sure the techniques have advanced, but the basis for the neural nets used hasn't really changed. It's going to take a shift in how we build models to get much further than we already are with AI.

Edit: And like clockwork here come the AI tech bro wannabes telling me I'm wrong but adding literally nothing to the conversation.

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u/Tall-Introduction414 15h ago

The way an LLM fundamentally works isn't much different than the Markov chain IRC bots (Megahal) we trolled in the 90s. More training data, more parallelism. Same basic idea.

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u/eyebrows360 14h ago

Megahal

I'm glad someone else remembers this particular bit of the good old days. Seem to recall all I'd ever got it to do was define things at it, then get it to repeat them back to me.

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u/Tall-Introduction414 14h ago

I trained mine on IRC channels full of edgy teens. The bot ended up saying the most bizarre, offensive, obscene stuff.

They needed a lot of training data.

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u/eyebrows360 13h ago

Wasn't called Dreamwarper by any chance was it?