This is the way. But also - keep your head up - your mindset matters more than you think. If you consider yourself a victim of your circumstances with no agency, this will be harder for you. So get your mentality right. Something along the lines of 'this is an exciting new era and I'm well prepared to master this new domain like I have many times before'.
The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
> At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
Having shame would require the LLMs to actually be able to recognize mistakes they make.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
They "recognize" mistakes just fine because you explicitly tell them. They recognize them well enough to correct (...sometimes). The way in which mistakes don't register is "Oh shit, that bad result was a result of my inappropriate actions. I must pay attention to not doing that again or the user will think I'm an idiot. I should even think about it some more to avoid the whole class of mistakes". Think of emotions as an attention mechanism that LLMs lack.
And many times, after an error is pointed out and an LLM offers an "explanation" for what happened, the LLM then gives the exact same erroneous result.
It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.
At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Well, humans developed language. Language is just a tool that let's us leverage our innate intelligence.
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
I think it's interesting that you think we could bootstrap an artificial brain with no inputs from human culture. I disagree, but am open to an existence proof of this kind. Such an artificial brain would be totally alien to us, of course. I wonder how differently it would perform versus something more grounded in "real" culture and writing?
I'd say that human babies and LLMs are both existence proof that prediction and prediction error feedback is all you need to learn. The artificial brain/baby would be designed to learn just like us by prediction, and should therefore be capable of learning language from scratch just as we do.
You could choose to lock it in a virtual or physical basement with printout of the Common Crawl dataset and raise it like an LLM that learns language with zero real world grounding, in which case it may feel a bit like an LLM (but smarter - able to learn, etc), or you could let it interact with the real world and learn everything, including language, that way and be a lot more grounded.
It's hard to guess how the grounded version would feel to talk to vs the CommonCrawl one - I think it would mostly come down to how far we wanted to go in making the artificial brain have all the moving parts of a human one. In an odd way the more human we tried to make it, the more alien it might feel, but not for the "uncanny valley" reason you might imagine...
The thing with an LLM that makes it feel so human is that they are designed to 100% copy humans - their output is 100% driven by the training goal of trying to exactly match the samples in the training set. As soon as we start to try to build something more brain-like then it's behavior is going to be a lot less predictable - not just auto-regressive "auto-pilot speech", but driven by it's own internal thoughts, emotions, innate traits, etc - depending on how much of our brain we tried to copy in the artificial one. I expect it would feel a lot more organic, less robotic, to talk to, but at the same time perhaps less human since unlike the LLM it's not built just to mimic human speech.
Yes, this to me is also a good sign for the "it's language that's smart, not us" argument. It's an emergent trait that has evolved several times, like flight or carcinization. There's something about language that attracts evolution toward it. One would expect such a trait to have a big survival value (disclaimer: IANA biologist, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, or linguist).
> I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
average person is absolutely awful judge on anything you put in front of average person tho.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
IDK if the author's 'metacognition' needs to be a feature of the LLM itself.
I could imagine a harness that 1) reads LLM output 2) uses a research sub-agent to attempt to verify any factual claims 2) rephrase the main agent's output such that it conveys uncertainty if the factual claim cannot be independently verified
No, I'm not considering a career change. But my career will change.
I started off as a javacript developer. Then I was a full stack SWE. Then I was an Applied AI Engineer. I think enterprises will have a need for folks with technical expertise to deliver value - often new software - for a long time.
Until an enterprise like capital one can operate without anyone in the organization knowing how any of their technical infrastructure works (never?) I expect I'll be able to find work.
This article forgot the strongest argument for hand writing your code. When the process is done, you understand it at a depth far beyond any vibe coder who created the same thing
My personal opinion is that all of San Francisco is best avoided, so I feel comfortable with my assessment even stipulating, arguendo, what you just said. :)
I lived in Chicago for about a decade, and around 2017 to 2023 I set a goal of biking to every one of the 76(?) neighborhoods. I made it to about 63. There are definitely neighborhoods rougher than others. But tbh every neighborhood has good food, and, you know, normal people living there. Like, in Garfield park I remember buying ribs from a guy that was just sorta cooking them outa the back of his truck. They were terrific. Pilsen has great Mexican food, and Devon has nuts Indian food (Ghareeb Narwaz is by far my favorite). Yeah, in some neighborhoods, on a couple of blocks there are guys out on the corner selling. But no one's bothering anyone. There's nowhere you can't go on a Saturday at 1PM. Basically, what I'm saying is, the Chicago you see on the news isn't the one I live in. So, you know, keep your wits about you, take care, but I think everyone in Chicago should go to a random neighborhood and get some food.
I've lived in some of the roughest neighborhoods there and never felt particularly unsafe walking around at all. A couple of times people dumped bodies in my yard, but I also had that problem when I lived in a really nice area too :D A couple of other times I took to my basement while there were gang shootouts happening outside my house.
There is lots of great food in Chicago. Downtown is nice to me. You can get around the whole city on bike + El (subway).
It's still my least favorite major city, though. I have no urge to live there again.
How can someone talk about a trivial experience of exploring food while acknowledging that they had bodies thrown into their yards? In both countries in Europe I lived I have never in my life seen a corpse outside of a funeral and even then. I also never heard gun shots except for hunting and never in an urban setting.
I can’t imagine having my little children suffering seeing the corpse of a dead human being and I would curse and never set foot on a land where that is normalised.
I grew up here and have lived here for the last 20 years and I have never met anybody here who could tell either of those stories. It sounds pretty made up.
Later
I should add, I have friends who grew up in Lawndale, Gage Park, and Auburn Gresham. They don't tell these stories either. Witnessing violence, lots of property crime, being fucked with by the cops, feeling threatened by gang activity, sure. Bodies dumped on their lawns? Hiding in their basement from gun fire? Not so much.
Bullshit. You could drop every Chicago murder victims body for a year in east Chatham and the chances of it landing in any particular yard would be small. And clearly most murder bodies don’t end up in any yard. For it to happen multiple times is a ludicrous claim.
I lived in Woodlawn for 15 years and never heard a gunshot, more or less went to my basement.
I’m not sure what your goal is. Chicago has a gun violence problem, like many cities in the US but claiming it’s that common is just for tricking gullible Europeans or making political hay.
I assume Woodlawn was probably peppered with Shotspotters just like Chatham was, so it's odd that they would install the equipment if there were no shootings at all.
Dude there's a shotspotter a couple blocks from my house and our police discharged a sidearm in the line of duty for the first time in over 10 years last year. Nobody was dumping bodies on your lawn.
You get that we live here right? How is this argument supposed to work out for you?
If you want to do some FOIAs on the CPD to prove the veracity of my statements I might be able to find the dates since I texted my landlord both times. The police wanted the camera footage from my building, but the camera wasn't working, so it didn't help them. There was also a Shotspotter on my block, so if you FOIA all the recordings from that you'll be able to see how many times there were shots detected from it.
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