The Many Ways that Digital Minds Can Know – Ryan Moulton's Articles

LLMs do all the things people say they do at once, even if those people vociferously disagree, and they’re all useful.

Detractors of LLMs describe them as blurry jpegs of the web , or stochastic parrots . Promoters of LLMs describe them as having sparks of AGI , or learning the generating function of multivariable calculus . These positions seem opposed to each other and are the subject of acrimonious debate. I do not think they are opposed, and I hope in this post to convince you of that. In particular: LLMs do both of the things that their promoters and detractors say they do. They do both of these at the same time on the same prompt. It is very difficult from the outside to tell which they are doing. Both o

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