You arent kidding. I’ve been trying to justify spending $275 on some Super Red Ember Bees or “settle” for $150 on six Blonde Rubber Ducky isopods.

LLM’s are a rather fascinating subject with lots of high level stuff that can be very daunting to understand. My laymans understanding is that generative systems such as Chat GPT are almost entirely probability based.

If I gave a LLM the following prompt: “in 2023 the current president of the United states is _____” fill in the blank. It would compare the prompt to its database of text and return Joe Biden with a 95% probability, Donald Trump with 4%, and some other random stuff for the remaining 1. It doesn’t actually KNOW what the prompt is and it doesn’t reason the answer. It’s only comparing what is in its database vs what’s been given to it.

This is why the larger the database it has the better answers it can return. True AI would be able to give you responses to anything having only been fed the contents of the dictionary. It could then reason what each word means and creatively form them into legible responses.

If you are interested in a very cool semi-interactive explanation of how generative systems work check out this website. I found it very fascinating.

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

From what I’ve read in different papers and talks on the subject the most concise definition for what a real AI would be is as follows.

The system must be self aware, understand it’s place in an environment, and be able to Reason, Adapt, and work towards internal goals.

If you ever want a good example of a failure of adaptability try playing chess with Chat GPT. Chat GPT is INCREDIBLE at what it does and is like nothing else we have ever seen.sometimes it seems downright spooky how good it can be at responding to normal requests and conversations. However It knows what chess is because it’s been trained on text that has the rules and the names of all the pieces. But because it is just a LLM which is effectively a word probability generator it can’t REASON what the game actually is or remember what pieces have been played or removed.

It’s like asking the deep blue chess computer to hold a conversation with you. It’s not happening.

Right now (to the best of my knowledge) there are no actual AI systems. Everything that is being called AI is just complex programs that are following EXACTLY what the programming has set in stone with no deviations.

The YouTube algorithm interestingly might be the one exception. If the rumors are to be. Believed it has grown so complex that YouTube itself doesn’t actually know how it works.

Almost annoying as all the media outlets and people calling machine learning AI. It’s genuinely tiring.