I don't think anybody who uses LLMs professionally day-to-day thinks that it can reason like human beings... If some people thought this, they fundamentally do not understand how LLMs work under the hood.
There are quite a lot of options out at the extremes and both ends seem to presuppose things about consciousness that even specialist's in the field have debated for years.
I'm ok with thinking it's possible that some subset of consciousness might exist in LLMs while also being well aware of their limitations. Cognitive science has plenty of examples of mental impairments that show that there are individuals that lack some of the things that LLMs also lack that. We would hardly deny those individuals are conscious. The distinction for what is thought is lower but no less complex.
Before we had machines pushing at these boundaries, there were very learned people debating these issues, but it seems like now some gut instincts from people who have chatted to a bot for a bit are carrying the day.
Oh buddy, step our of your bubble. There are people out there who swear by LLM being a modern day mesahiah. And no, this are not just SV VCs trying to sell their investments.
Sure but VCs always exaggerate. Remember the dot com bubble? Or "there's an app for that"?
The internet and smartphones were still extremely useful. There's no need to refute VC exaggeration. It's like writing articles to prove that perfume won't catch you Bradd Pitt. Nobody literally believes the adverts but that doesn't mean perfume is a lie.
I'm not saying that VCs only push good ideas - e.g. flying cars & web3 aren't going to work. Just that their claims are obviously exaggerated and can be ignored, even for useful ideas.
I think what you are remembering is just nostalgia, people tend to remember the good things and shut out the bad ones.
I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they pulled the rug under you because they could.
You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or the highway.
I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.
Yes, agree. Bill Gates was never ”one of us”. He came from extreme privilege and used his advantage to kill off much more innovative technologies. BeOS, anyone?
To be fair, much of the coding community is highly educated - especially in the top companies, which generally hire from top schools - and therefore likely to be privileged.
There is a Neovim plugin for VSCode that uses an embedded implementation of Neovim in the background that lets you use the full power of Neovim in VSCode, and even most Neovim plugins work too.
I still remember in the late oughts, when Mac software updates came out (say, 10.x.1 or whatever, Safari updates, etc.) an app called Software Update would tell you about them, allow you to click to download and install what you wanted, the installation all happened in the background while you worked, and then at the end the SWU dock icon would bounce to prompt you to restart when ready. Guess what? quick option-right-click → Force Quit on the app would shut that up, then you could go about your day and reboot when you were ready.
Today, the Mac harangues you every time you wake it about the updates, then to apply them, you must reboot immediately, and stare at various Apple logos and progress bars for an indeterminate amount of time (no estimates offered).
It's hard to switch away from mononoki, Iosevka comes really close, if I spend enough time to full customize it to my liking maybe it could become my #1 pick.
I don't think anybody who uses LLMs professionally day-to-day thinks that it can reason like human beings... If some people thought this, they fundamentally do not understand how LLMs work under the hood.
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