Those nonplussed by this wave of AI are just yawning.
Because people have different definition of what intelligence is. Recreating the human brain in a computer would definitely be neat and interesting but you don't need that nor AGI to be revolutionary.
LLMs, as perfect Chinese Rooms, lack a mind or human intelligence but demonstrate increasingly sophisticated behavior. If they can perform tasks better than humans, does their lack of "understanding" and "thinking" matter?
The goal is to create a different form of intelligence, superior in ways that benefit us. Planes (or rockets!) don't "fly" like birds do but for our human needs, they are effectively much better at flying that birds ever could be.
The argument for regulation in that case would be because of the socio-economic risk of taking people's jobs, essentially.
So, again: pure regulatory capture.
We've been doing this forever with everything. Building tools is what makes us unique. Why is building what amounts to a calculator/spreadsheet/CAD program for language somehow a Rubicon that cannot be crossed? Did people freak out this much about computers replacing humans when they were shown to be good at math?
I was simply explaining why I believe your perspective is not represented in the discussions in the media, etc. If these models were not getting incredibly good at mimicking intelligence, it would not be possible to play on people's fears of it.
We've already crossed it and I believe we should go full steam ahead, tech is cool and we should be doing cool things.
> Did people freak out this much about computers replacing humans when they were shown to be good at math?
Too young but I'm sure they did freak out a little! Computers have changed the world and people have internalized computers as being much better/faster at math but exhibiting creativity, language proficiency and thinking is not something people thought computers were supposed to do.
I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion.
But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.
Because it's wrong and smart people know that.
LLMs are not sentient. They have no agency. They do nothing a human doesn't tell them to do.
We may create actual sentient independent AI someday. Maybe we're getting closer. But not only is this not it, but I fail to see how trying to license it will prevent that from happening.
I work in tech too and don't want to lose my job and have to go back to blue collar work, but there's a lot of blue collar workers who would find that a pretty ridiculous statement and there is plenty of demand for that work these days.
That fact does not entail what theses models can or cannot do. For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function.
But more importantly, what SOTA is now does not predict what it will be in the future. What we know is that there is rapid progress in that domain. Intelligence explosion could be real or not, but it's foolish to ignore its consequences because current AI models are not that clever yet.
AutoGPTs and the likes are much overhyped (it's early tech experiments after all) and have not produced anything of value yet but having dabbled with autonomous agents, I definitely see a not so distant future when you can outsource valuable tasks to such systems.
Every process minimizes a loss function.
There's multiple both open and proprietary projects right now to make agentic AI, so that barrier don't be around for long.