Comment by thinking_cactus
Comment by thinking_cactus 2 days ago
> They literally only understand text
I don't see why only understanding text is completely associated with 'schastic-parrot'-ness. There are blind-deaf people around (mostly interacting through reading braille I think) which are definitely not stochastic parrots.
Moreover, they do have a little bit of Reinforcement Learning on top of reproducing their training corpus.
I believe there has to be some even if very primitive form of thinking (and something like creativity even) even to do the usual (non-RL, supervised) LLMs job of text continuation.
The most problematic thing is humans tend to abhor middle grounds. Either it thinks or it doesn't. Either it's an unthinking dead machine, a s.p., or human-like AGI. The reality is probably in between (maybe still more on the side of s.p. s, definitely with some genuine intelligence, but with some unknown, probably small, sentience as of yet). Reminder that sentience and not intelligence is what should give it rights.
Because blind-deaf people interact with the world directly. LLMs do not, cannot, and have never seen the actual world. A better analogy would be a blind-deaf person born in Plato's Cave, reading text all day. They have no idea why these things were written, or what they actually represent.