Tim Scarfe: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think that that our environment is an important part of who we are. I think that 1 of the moves that I see over and over again from these guys, is this idea that intelligence is an individual trait as opposed to something collective and social. And I don't think that that's right. And I also, you know, for what it's worth, don't think that we're actually very much like LLMs. You know, I I think that if nothing else, the fact that an LLM takes in more text than any human could in a human lifespan in order to be worse at language in many ways than a 5 year old. And 5 year olds take in far far less and do far more with it. That right there is a good indication that, we're pretty different. I know. But but I I should push back a little bit because I don't know whether you played with Mythos before it got taken offline. But, you know, even though we can criticize the functionalism thing and we can talk about Chomsky's competence versus performance, you know, that there's a difference. But what what we do see, though, is that these models can do things that we do extremely well, they seem to be getting better all the time there. You know, even though they do a different type of syntactic processing than we do, arguably, it's in some ways better than than we do. So there's something is is is kind of validating their functionalist hypothesis. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something going on there. Right? And then the question is, okay, what is it? What's the significance of that? I would argue that we're learning some interesting things about how language works and what you can get out of the sort of mathematical structure and statistical properties of language. But, you know, I don't remember who said this, but people people speculate about whether, you know, LLMs are alive, but you don't speculate or alive, you know, conscious. But you don't hear people speculating about whether, systems with similar architectures that don't work with language are conscious. So nobody's asking if like AlphaFold is conscious. And I think that says a lot about how we as humans see systems that process and use language…

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