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1. vannev+14[view] [source] 2025-04-08 19:44:13
>>todsac+(OP)
I would argue that Lenat was at least directionally correct in understanding that sheer volume of data (in Cyc's case, rules and facts) was the key in eventually achieving useful intelligence. I have to confess that I once criticized the Cyc project for creating an ever-larger pile of sh*t and expecting a pony to emerge, but that's sort of what has happened with LLMs.
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2. chubot+ca[view] [source] 2025-04-08 20:26:50
>>vannev+14
That’s hilarious, but at least Llama was trained on libgen, an archive of most books and publications by humanity, no? Except for the ones which were not digitized I guess

So there is probably a big pile of Reddit comments, twitter messages, and libgen and arxiv PDFs I imagine

So there is some shit, but also painstakingly encoded knowledge (ie writing), and yeah it is miraculous that LLMs are right as often as they are

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3. ChadNa+Qj[view] [source] 2025-04-08 21:36:11
>>chubot+ca
It's a miracle, but it's all thanks to the post-training. When you think of it, for so-called "next token predictors", LLMs talk in a way that almost no one actually talks, with perfect spelling and use of punctuation. The post-training somehow is able to get them to predict something along the lines of what a reasonably intelligent assistant with perfect grammar would say. LLMs are probably smarter than is exposed through their chat interface, since it's unlikely the post-training process is able to get them to impersonate the smartest character they'd be capable of impersonating.
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4. chubot+nm[view] [source] 2025-04-08 21:55:45
>>ChadNa+Qj
I dunno I actually think say Claude AI SOUNDS smarter than it is, right now

It has a phenomenal recall. I just asked it about "SmartOS", something I knew about, vaguely, in ~2012, and it gave me a pretty darn good answer. On that particular subject, I think it probably gave a better answer than anyone I could e-mail, call, or text right now

It was significantly more informative than wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS

But I still find it easy to stump it and get it to hallucinate, which makes it seem dumb

It is like a person with good manners, and a lot of memory, and which is quite good at comparisons (although you have to verify, which is usually fine)

But I would not say it is "smart" at coming up with new ideas or anything

I do think a key point is that a "text calculator" is doing a lot of work ... i.e. summarization and comparison are extremely useful things. They can accelerate thinking

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