Look, I'm telling you something I know to be true, which is that when a lot of people talk about "it" they're referring to a whole system, a whole phenomenon. From what I can tell you're not looking at things from this angle, but from a more categorical one.

Even on a technical level, these chatbots are using reinforcement learning on the fly to dynamically tune their output... They're not just GPT, they're GPT + live input from users and the search engine.

As for the GPT part, where did the training data come from? Who generated it? Who curated it? Who preconditioned it? How was it weighted? Who set the hyperparameters? Who had the conversations about what's working and what needs to change? Those were people and all their actions went into the "end result", which is much more complex than you're making it out to be.

You are applying your categorical thinking when you talk about "it". Drawing a neat little box around the program, as though it was a well written node module. What I'm telling you is that not everyone is referring to the same thing as you when they talk about this. If you want to understand what all these people mean you're going to have to shift your perspective to more of a "systems thinking" point of view or something like that.

That’s a very “is” argument, but I’m saying we “ought” not worry such as I see in this submission’s comments.

It’s self defining; whatever people are saying here, I’m saying those comments are overblown. What “it” is I leave up to whoever is doomsaying, as there is no version of “it” that’s worth doomsaying over.

You seem to have an extreme arrogance surrounding your ability to understand what these programs are doing at a base level. Can you explain further your ability to understand this? What gives you such grand confidence to say these sorts of things?

Not the parent poster. The vast number of commenters in this thread seem to assume that these LLMs are close to, if not actually, general AIs. It’s quite refreshing to see comments challenging the hype.

Don’t you think the burden of proof lies with those that think this is something more than a just a dumb statistical model?

That's not what anyone is saying. What we're saying is that these technologies are already outside of our realm of understanding. We have already entered a zone where we do not know what these LLMs can do, or what they're capable of.

And that is truly terrifying. That's the gist of what we're all trying to say. Everyone else seems to be going "Bah! How stupid to think that this is anything more than pattern recognition and prediction!"

The same phrase could be used to describe a human. We're just trying to say "we don't know what this technology is, and we don't know what it can do". Anyone saying "it's clearly just a tool!" is being dangerously arrogant.