The propaganda police are lying. There is nothing wrong with C/C++, you are just too lazy to handle your own memory, and you accepted that propaganda that "managing your own memory is hard" without even trying.
The idea that this terrible advice floats at all tell you how terrible educations are these days. The idea is ridiculous and yet nobody calls it what it is: it is stupid and those that follow that advice out of fear are dumber than rocks.
Comprehension, humans have it, animals have it in limited form, trained algorithms have none at all. The training process is our wholesale replacement for no artificial comprehension. If we ever develop artificial comprehension, that is AGI all by itself, no training required.
To be fair, humans have it in limited form, too. We just don't know how much comprehension we do not yet have, because we cannot comprehend something we cannot comprehend.
My parrot clearly understands basic events and phrases. He knows what "snacks" involve when I ask if we should have some, he knows the difference between "good morning" and "bedtime", and he can correctly use "Oh!" when he stumbles and follow up with a "Good boy!" when he gets back up again.
But he cannot fathom the complexity of "going to work to earn money".
Just like we humans cannot fathom the complexity of something we have yet to fully understand. People who experience a DMT trip will experience the journey but be unable to comprehend and explain what happened in hindsight. I'm sure there's a TON more we cannot comprehend that we don't know about.
Also we can't comprehend why parrots are not going to parrot work to earn parrot money, or how parrot-to-parrot communication works, or how to be a good and respected parrot in a parrot society.
I also can't comprehend why I wake up early to go to human work to earn human money.
Best I can do is some high-school mumbo-jumbo about farming and specialization furthering wealth acquisition.
But to truly comprehend the situation I'd have to study economics and current events and sociology and even then I think it's a lot of theories and sometimes when I hear economists talk I wonder that it may not be coming out of their mouth.
Humans think too highly about themselves particularly when judging other species. How can we judge something we can’t experience ourselves? like multiple distributed consciousness of octopuses or emergent descentralized logic of ants?Some species even with tiny brains or no brains at all can solve problems for which humans spent years of engineering and planning. See study below of slime replicating the Tokyo rail network in 26 hours optimizing by cost efficiency and fault tolerance.
How sure are you that comprehension is not a mere form of advanced pattern matching? We have the intuition that ideas and words appear trivially in people's mind, based on comprehension. I think chances are, that intuition is wrong.
Ideas and words aren’t the same thing, or from the same model - words are a communication layer, with robust error correction - but ideas stem from intuition, which is more of a lossy aggregative/associative model. There’s a balance to be had in each when operating a human mind, I find - let the latter suggest ideas and potential association, let the former robustly prove or disprove them. So yes, it’s pattern matching on all levels, but pattern matching within words doesn’t produce new ideas as readily - instead the idea-space is queried directly.
IMO we really are just a bunch of models that interoperate.
Maybe it is, but if it is, it is one that includes more parts in our system.
The way LLMs lack broader context, have a narrow focus, and hallucinate, strike me as similar to people that have had traumatic brain injuries to their right hemisphere. Those people may hallucinate that the left side (the right hemisphere senses the left side of the body) of their body is made of wood and hinges and can talk to you about it like it is the most natural thing in the world. When the information gets to the left hemisphere to construct language about what they sense, there is a failure of the right to deliver the broader context to the left hemisphere that that's not possible, but they won't bat an eye discussing what they believe.
So, we have a left hemisphere where we do most of our focused thinking, logic, constructing language, etc. and LLMs seem pretty similar to a lot of that. But, we also think without language, thinking does not require language. A lot of thinking is also happening in the right hemisphere and it isn't using formal logic, isn't using narrow focus but rather intuition based on broad contextual and experiential embodied knowledge. And this type of thinking isn't binary, it accommodates paradoxes without issue. LLMs don't currently have anything analogous to this type of knowledge and this type of processing AFAICT.
In addition, that intuition might be tied to a feedback system with the body, for example, our second brain, the gut, provides a lot of control over how our body performs and provides a lot of feedback to the brain about how we feel. In fact, all feelings are sensed in the body (gut feelings, cold feet, weak in the knees, lump in your throat, burning ears, tight fists, etc.). Part of our intuition is based on considering an idea, sensing how we feel about that idea, sensed in various parts of the body, and then bouncing that back and forth across hemispheres to decide.
I wonder, what sort of pattern matching can we build that models embodied feelings. How would you model boredom, hunger, lust, fear, humor, etc? I think that's possible, but I don't know that we'll be able to do that with a normal computer, I think the way the brain works is more analogous to a symphony of simultaneous signals being processed with an emergent thought and less like a single-threaded process assembling words.
Maybe we can enumerate and model the human drivers of behavior and get something closer to what we're calling comprehension here, but token predictors for language are not getting us any closer to human comprehension. The human brain might just be an anticipation machine, but LLMs only deal with one dimension of human behavior, language, and there's little reason to think you can skip modeling everything that leads to human comprehension and still get anything more than just word babel with compounding error rates in predicting words that represent human comprehension.
It requires some kind of signal. Words of a language are a signal.
We choose words for an llm to interact with us, but other transformers work on pixel values or audio sample values. There exist transformers used on brain probe generated values.
I would see human language processing as a kind of coprocessor sitting in another side of the brain. But the same can be said about transformers in general. The words side is only part of them, to be able to communicate.
Sure: comprehension is the ability to instantaneously create virtualized simulations of observation, and then decompose them into component parts that simultaneously and instantaneously evaluate each and every one of our observations for both individual plausibility and their composed combined plausibility as the observation.
This occurs constantly and continually inside the mind of every conscious human, it is what we call "being conscious".
This constant and never ending evaluation of all observations cannot be turned off, when turned off a person is "unconscious".
This is our human security and survival system, impressed into us for survival in a predator and prey environment, and is the seat of our consciousness: comprehension is a running simulation of all our observations for the purpose of our safety and self preservation.
Today, our environment is largely social and abstracted from "fight or flight", but our predator and prey dynamic is as present and strong and required as it ever was.
I won't discuss your definition of comprehension, which is interesting if rather handwavy. But you still didn't provide any proof that humans have it (not even yourself), nor a proof that machines don't or can't have it.
Well, you proved you have it with your declaration of my statement as "handwavy". That assessment requires comprehension, so you've got it. To "prove" a person has comprehension, if they "learn" without a statistical coverage of all possible inputs and outputs, that's comprehension in action: they created a simulation of the learned thing and ran in to assess, to comprehend the phenomenon. If you want a mathematical proof, you're expecting too much from hacker news.
> you proved you have it with your declaration of my statement as "handwavy". That assessment requires comprehension
Look, I totally agree with you here. It does require comprehension (by any definition, not necessarily yours), and most humans display it in many areas [1]. The problem is that any good LLM could and would have provided the exact same assessment [2]. Which is enough for me to declare them capable of comprehension.
[1] But not in all areas. For example buzzword-filled company and marketing communication, pseudoscience, and some particularly obscure continental philosophy, prove that humans can behave as if they had comprehension even when they have none.
[2] I gave it to Claude Fable 5.1 without any other context than "what do you think of this definition" and it answered: "interesting, with some real insight, but I think it overreaches".
Yeah people saying that only humans have comprehension clearly are not familiar with philosophy even at a basic level. It’s ok to not know something. See the Critique section of the “I think therefore I am” article on Wikipedia to learn about why it’s tempting but unwarranted to believe we only can think, or even that we in fact are thinking (see also psychology studies that put conscious thoughts into question since brain activity indicates actions start much earlier in the unconscious cerebrum rather than in the frontal cortex): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
One of my favorite topics, and one that many people argue exists. The conventional thinker really dislikes this concept, as if it points out some personal flaw of theirs. I mention that only because it really sticks out, the personalized perspective people take on this idea of invisible companies they cannot see.
That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.
Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.
Nobody wants to watch such films, they want to muck with the filmmaker, the generation apparatus. That's the product, if there is one here, and absolutely not the 3 hour epic that's spit out with 4 variations to choose between. That's work. We'll have other LLMs pointlessly tell us which should be watched, we'll view a summary, and vote the Oscar on that.
The results are boring. Not because the content is boring, but because you can so easily remix the results. Human curation is what creates value with these, not dumping and consuming. A personal perspective of a human being ups the respect, where the exact same sentences generated by an LLM carry no such value.
Tolkien did the human creative work - I just want a movie adaptation that’s as honest to the original text as possible. Think translating the text into video.
They are different mediums. While the underlying story might be Tolkien's, every frame is an artistic choice and while LLMs can make a choice is many situations, they are unable to 1) keep it coherent b) make it meaningful because art, to me and most, in an outcome of human experiences and thought, which by definition an llm cannot do.
Do you really want a 20 minute pause in the action, every time a new room or space is encountered, because Tolkien goes on for 2-5 pages describing every new environment like that.
> It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble.
Our media is a weaponized crap factory. There is literally nothing but propaganda and insider knowledge. You're network is how you survive today, mass media and social media and anyone that uses these medias as guidance is weaponized against their own interests. Your own critical analysis, secondary considerations, knowledge of real factual history, and your effective communications skills are how you survive. Not by listening to others and their parrot echo of some media propaganda trying to control the narrative.
And there were an unimaginable number of tax loopholes available back then that ultimately reduced the individual tax rate enormously. You just had to reinvest your income in a multitude of increasingly bizarre tax dodges devised by increasingly byzantine tax laws.
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