Either you say that a pocket calculator understands arithmetic, and that LLM understand language, which is something trivial. If a pocket calculator understands arithmetic, than previous substitutes to calculators, such as an abacus, do too. In this case, a word dictionary also understand language. And it is basically what Chiang's article says: the LLM don't understand language more than a word dictionary does. If you disagree with Chiang, it looks like you do only because you don't understand what he is saying, or somehow are not mature enough to realise that Chiang may use a different definition of "understanding" than yours in a fully legitimate way, like everyone is always doing when talking about plenty of subject.
Or you pretend that a pocket calculator understanding of arithmetic is somehow different than the one of an abacus or other obviously inanimate object who are obviously not thinking.
If Windows isn't the gold standard having 70% of the market, then what is? Azure is in second place not by far after AWS. And these are huge, HUGE markets. I wouldn't say your local grocer is dead because it's not Costco, and of course by this logic Costco is itself dead because it's not Walmart.
Maybe we are jumping the gun on Windows. My echo chamber is tech people and they seemed to have lost faith in windows after they Windows 11 introduced ads and plugged every hole that allowed to bypass needing a Microsoft account. Gaming and anti-cheat not working on Linux will keep that market share high for a while.
My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.
Crazy. On mobile it’s relatively easy to grab the playhead and scrub back and forth quickly over the full length of the video — this shows how the face movements are totally repetitive and constrained to a very limited space and variety.
This isn't even well done. I also opened it in a private browsing window, and the ad I was served was the most obviously AI-generated slop hawking some kind of health drink...that was clearly just a badly generated bottle of apple cider vinegar (text on the bottle was all mangled but it's exactly the kind my grocery store sells), and the "doctor" speaking barely synced up with his voice. Do people falling for these just have no sense of the uncanny valley?
The man ran into the woman. [Young adult Far East man runs into young adult Far East woman.] The woman said sorry, I am such a clutz. The man said, that’s okay. The man fell in love with the woman. The man dated the woman for many weeks. The man met the woman’s father [Tekken grandpa]. The man did not recognize the father. The man and the woman got married. Turns out that the father was actually the owner of the company where the man worked and the daughter was the heiress. The man and the woman went out for dinner.
these videos are as close as we can get to plant electrodes directly in your brain's reward center, and repeatedly pressing the "reward" button. obviously not everyone is the same, but if it hits it hits hard.
As a first approximation, why not? Behavior is generally all we have in front of us, plus any other assorted social signals. Internal mental states are invisible, as is the personal history of the individual. We might note a man beating a kitten on the sidewalk, and believe this behavior sufficient grounds to reduce this person to the category "dick", even if we remained unaware of his high intelligence, his doctoral paper on gender-inequality, and the fact his mother hates him.
> But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions.
This is obviously false. Every developer has had hour-long debugging sessions to track down a mysterious behavior. Sometimes entire teams are stumped by a technical glitch. Until the bug is found, nobody knows everything about the machine.
You're comparing the wrong numbers. The question is what 1% of the purchase price does to the amount you need for your down payment and fees. On a 10% down payment an extra 1% increases the amount you need by 10%. Remember that while a million dollar home sounds extravagant, it's first time buyers who often have just barely enough who are trying to buy these.
I tried out Gemini in Google Sheets the other day. I asked a pretty simple question and the agent ran for like two minutes trying to answer it until I stopped it. I can't imagine these agentic features are cheap to run for what they get you.
Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.
I think the problem with that sort of thought is that the burgeoning sizes of output for even trivial software makes it almost a certainty that:
a) The stuff output by the existing LLMs is too unwieldy even for them to handle , even if the product itself is a glorified chatbot.
b) If all software is throwaway, then the value of all software drops to, effectively, the price of an AI subscription. We'll all be drowning in a market of lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), whilst also being producers in said market.
another aspect is amount of code LLMs can handle went from few lines to small codebase in few years, so future is just possible for a lot bigger codebases?
The simulacrum of a thing is a simulacrum of the thing though. LLMs are trained to simulate human thinking, and while their thought process is not the same, you can't say for sure that the thinking output is not necessary for their thought process to end up in the place where a human thought process would end up. If the "Interesting!" token(s) wasn't there, for all you know it would have gone down a completely different path.
Why would you want to live in a free-standing house instead of a nice apartment given the choice? There are pros and cons sure, but unless you can hire someone to do all the house things I don't see it being a clear win.
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