You were so close! The takeaway is not that LlmS represent a bottomless tar pit of piracy (they do) but that someone can immediately perform the task 58% better without the AI than with it. This is nothing more than “look what the clever computer can do.”
A robot could certainly be programmed to get food for a sick, dying friend (I mean, don't drones deliver Uber Eats?) but it will never understand why, or have a phenomenal experience of the act, or have a mental state of performing the act, or have the biological brain state of performing the act, or etc. etc.
Perhaps when we deliver food to our sick friend we subconsciously feel an "atta boy" from our parents who perhaps "trained" us in how to be kind when we were young selfish things.
Obviously if that's all it is we could of course "reinforce" this in AI.
> isn't this also telling us what "understanding" is?
When people start studying theory of mind someone usually jumps in with this thought. It's more or less a description of Functionalism (although minus the "mental state"). It's not very popular because most people can immediately identify an phenomenon of understanding separate from the function of understanding. People also have immediate understanding of certain sensations, e.g. the feeling of balance when riding a bike, sometimes called qualia. And so on, and so forth. There is plenty of study on what constitutes understanding and most healthily dismiss the "string of words" theory.
A similar kind of question about "understanding" is asking whether a house cat understands the physics of leaping up onto a countertop. When you see the cat preparing to jump, it take a moment and gazes upward to its target. Then it wiggles its rump, shifts its tail, and springs up into the air.
Do you think there are components of the cat's brain that calculate forces and trajectories, incorporating the gravitational constant and the cat's static mass?
Probably not.
So, does a cat "understand" the physics of jumping?
The cat's knowledge about jumping comes from trial and error, and their brain builds a neural network that encodes the important details about successful and unsuccessful jumping parameters. Even if the cat has no direct cognitive access to those parameters.
So the cat can "understand" jumping without having a "meta-understanding" about their understanding. When a cat "thinks" about jumping, and prepares to leap, they aren't rehearsing their understanding of the physics, but repeating the ritual that has historically lead them to perform successful jumps in the past.
I think the theory of mind of an LLM is like that. In my interactions with LLMs, I think "thinking" is a reasonable word to describe what they're doing. And I don't think it will be very long before I'd also use the word "consciousness" to describe the architecture of their thought processes.
That’s interesting. I thought your cat analogy (which I really liked) was going to be an example of how LLMs do not have understanding the way a cat understands the skill of jumping. But then you went the other way.
I'm surprised at this. I find music discovery easy. Some tips:
On Bandcamp: in addition to obviously following artists I like, I follow several fan accounts of those artists, then I can see what they buy. I also try to sample the Bandcamp album of the day.
On NTS.live I have a bunch of favourite hosts and try to listen to every show they release, and note the track listing. Too many to ever get through.
Podcasts: NPR All Songs Considered, and Resident Advisor when I can.
On Apple Music there's the algorithm. Hit or miss.
Back in the heydays of music blogs I would find a lot of great stuff on Hype Machine, but alas, I think those days are gone.
Just with these few sources I find there is far too much great new music to get through in one lifetime. Godspeed!
It seems the total disregard that the tech community showed toward copyright when it was artists losing out has come back to bite. Face-eating leopards, etc.
Before the 19th Century "ignore" meant "to not know," in accordance with its Latin origins, if you're looking for other words to try and turn back the clock on against the overwhelming tide of modern usage.
Great framework. Unfortunately Apple hijack certain arrow shapes (e.g. the home button) and incorrectly display these as emoji. There’s a CSS override you can add to prevent this but I don’t remember off top of my head.
That is a good plan on first consideration, but on close inspection appears to require that the tool author was omniscient and anticipated every possible use of their tool.
Traditionally a lot of the usefulness from tools comes from people doing things that were not intended. The modern web springs to mind, it was a terrible hack in the grand old IE days.
It is better for tools to have obvious failure modes.
