No we don't, we are just trying to put a damper on all the "the singularity is here!" style comments that seems to flood any discussion about GPT.
Yep. Welcome to HN. And welcome to the majority of humanity!
https://lifearchitect.ai/contrarianism/
These models are trained to produce text snippets that look like text snippets it has seen before, and it has seen all internet. That means it can do a lot of impressive things, but also that it is very dumb in other ways.
I've seen it being dumb in maths or real world problems. But as a large language models, they understand and speak languages fine, and even mistakes they make look like mistakes humans who are not natives in the language would make.
We may as well say that when we speak, we are just predicting words we have trained on. I don't see how these models are worse than people in that regard.
The general knowledge and thinking of these models are surely limited. But seeing GPT-4 go from text only input to text with images, I think it is very possible to break the barriers very soon.
> they understand and speak languages fine
No, they neither 'understand' nor 'speak' languages. The first word here is the more delusional, they have no understanding of languages. They have simply generated a model of the language. And they do not 'speak' the language they have modeled; they generate text in that language. Speaking generally implies an active intelligence; there is no intelligence behind an LLM. There is simply a machine generating (wholly derivative) output text from input text.
> We may as well say that when we speak, we are just predicting words we have trained on
This is the delusion, commonly being repeated, that humans themselves are only LLMs. This is a dangerous delusion, in my view, and one that has no evidence behind it. It is only a supposition, and a sterile and nihilistic one in my view.
> The general knowledge and thinking of these models are surely limited [...] I think it is very possible to break the barriers very soon
The limitations are fundamental to LLMs. LLMs have no general knowledge and LLMs don't do any 'thinking'. Your understanding of what they are doing is in grave error, and that error is based on a personification of the machine. An error coming from the delusion that because they generate 'natural' language they are operating similarly to us (false and addressed above). They are never going to break the limits because they have never started to transcend those limits in the first place, nor can they. They don't and will never 'think' or 'reason'.
> designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a trivial task that any human could achieve.
I know a competent man should be able to "change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders [...]" and what not and specialization is for insects, but even on the Mysterious Island not everyone is Cyrus Smith (Harding).
What will be the other impacts?
This is just another tool in the student’s toolbox and should be treated as such.
But look how far we've come since those heady and carefree days. We're already able to pour buckets of scorn on its capabilities, and brush them aside as if designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a trivial task that any human could achieve.