Someone should let Waymo, Zoox, Pony.ai, Apollo Go, and even Tesla know!

> Language doesn't just describe reality; it creates it.

I wonder if this is a statement from the discussed paper or from the blog author. Haven't found the original paper yet, but this blog post very much makes me want to read it.

This reminds me Douglas Hofstadter, of the Gödel, Escher, Bach fame. He rejected all of this statistical approaches towards creating intelligence and dug deep into the workings of human mind [1]. Often, in the most eccentric ways possible.

> ... he has bookshelves full of these notebooks. He pulls one down—it’s from the late 1950s. It’s full of speech errors. Ever since he was a teenager, he has captured some 10,000 examples of swapped syllables (“hypodeemic nerdle”), malapropisms (“runs the gambit”), “malaphors” (“easy-go-lucky”), and so on, about half of them committed by Hofstadter himself.

>

> For Hofstadter, they’re clues. “Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.”

I don't know when, where, and how the next leap in AGI will come through, but it's just very likely, it will be through brute-force computation (unfortunately). So much for fifty years of observing Freudian slips.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...

A much better framework for thinking about intelligence is simply as the ability to make predictions about the world (including conditional ones like "what will happen if we take this action"). Whether it's achieved through "true understanding" (however you define it; I personally doubt you can) or "mimicking" bears no relevance for most of the questions about the impact of AI we are trying to answer.

Question for the author: how are SOTA LLM models not common sense machines?

The core misconception here is that LLMs are autonomous agents parroting away. No, they are connected to humans, tools, reference data, and validation systems. They are in a dialogue, and in a dialogue you quickly get into a place where nobody has ever been before. Take any 10 consecutive words from a human or LLM and chances are nobody on the internet stringed those words the same way before.

LLMs are more like pianos than parrots, or better yet, like another musician jamming together with you, creating something together that none would do individually. We play our prompts on the keyboard and they play their "music" back to us. Good or bad - depends on the player at the keyboard, they retain most control. To say LLMs are Stochastic Parrots is to discount the contribution of the human using it.

Related to intelligence, I think we have a misconception that it comes from the brain. No, it comes from the feedback loop between brain and environment. The environment plays a huge role in exploration, learning, testing ideas, and discovery. The social aspect also plays a big role, parallelizing exploration and streamlining exploitation of discoveries. We are not individually intelligent, it is a social, environment based process, not a pure-brain process.

Searching for intelligence in the brain is like searching for art in the paint pigments and canvas cloth.

I don't get the problem with this really. I think LLM's "reasoning" is a very fair and proper way to call it. It takes time and spits out tokens that it recursively uses to get a much better output than it otherwise would have. Is it actually really reasoning using a brain like a human would? No. But it is close enough so I don't see the problem calling it "reasoning". What's the fuss about?

they don't need to reach equal human intelligence, the just need to reach an acceptable of intelligence so corporation can reduce labor cost

sure it bad at certain things but you know what ??? most of real world job didn't need a genius either

That is also a fallacy from being too immersed in a professional environment filled with deep reasoning and a deep rooted tradition of logic.

In the greater human civilization you will find an abundance of individuals lacking both reasoning and common sense.