Classical AI was about some genius trying to devise the most genius computer inference algorithm. But any single genius can only do so much in limited time and it is difficult to make them work together.
Whereas LLMs are not genius, they are simply using statistics to predict what is the accumulated intellect on the internet. They are simple but they combine the output of millions of minds, which no human genius could ever do.
They are a brain addition machine, rather than super-intelligent by themselves. But when you add together the outputs of many minds you get powerful general purpose output.
a) publicly available
b) encoded in a format appropriate for training LLMs on
c) similar enough to what index funds are doing
I like that metaphor. They are literally language-gradient addition machines. Language and brains - closely related - but different in that language can add up while brains forever remain separate. Language is an evolutionary process running at higher speed than biological evolution.
Accurate information is also over represented because you can be wrong in far more ways than you can be correct. In other words the wisdom of the crowd is in part the 10% of people that know X all match each other while the other 90% is all over the place.
I also don’t think you need to remove the dumb comments from the training material anyway. The AI could be able to simulate either someone of 80 IQ or 180 IQ, producing output consistent with both personas.
And ignorant person could have a very high IQ still be very ignorant.
LLMs may not be "smart" but they know a lot.
It's "LLMs can do this category of thing, too". The generality of the architecture is a novel scientific finding in and of itself. Do you remember the last 50 years of AI research where GOFAI systems were universally too fragile to function outside of highly constrained environments, and earlier neural networks were either ineffectual or extremely specialised? The fact that LLMs can function incredibly well (compared to historical AI systems) in diverse scenarios is the scientifically interesting finding.