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No. I am saying that the broader scientific community probably cannot run experiments on ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini as they would be able to on say a mouse's brain or even on human subjects with carefully controlled experiments and that can be replicated by 3rd parties.

As for "understanding" you have to be more precise about what you mean: we created LLMs and Transformer based ANNs (and ANNs themselves) and it appears we are all mystified by what they can do ... as though they are magic ... and will lead to Super-intelligence (an even more poorly defined term than regular-ass intelligence).

I'm not trying to be difficult: but I sometimes wonder if all of us were to take a step back and really try and understand this tech before jumping to conclusions! "The thing that was designed to be a universal function approximator approximates the function we trained it to approximate! HOLY CRAP WE MAY HAVE MADE GOD!" It's clear that the the technologies we currently have are miraculous and do amazing things! But are they really doing exactly what humans do? Is it possible to converge at similar destinations without taking the same route? Are we even at the exact same destination?

discuss

tim333|10 months ago

People are trying to run experiments on Claude - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43495617

chunkmonke99|10 months ago

Yes I know of this "study" AFAIK it has not been subjected to peer-review and uses a lot of suggestive language. Other studies have shown that these things use large bags of heuristics which isn't surprising given that are trained on unimaginably large amounts of tokens.

I am not an expert ... but to me anything that is associated with these companies is marketing. I understand that makes me a "stick in the mud" but it's not a crime to be skeptical! THAT SHOULD BE THE DEFAULT ... we used to believe in gods, demons, and monsters. Given that Anthropic is very very closely related to EA and Longtermism and given that this is the "slickest" paper I have ever read ...

If I had the mental capacity to have read a good amount of the internet and millions of pirated books ... I wouldn't be confused by perturbations in questions I have already previously seen.

I am sure there are lots of cogent rebuttals to what I am saying and hey maybe I'm just a sack of meat that is miffed about being replaced by a "superior intelligence" that is "more evolved". But that isn't how evolution works either and it's troubling to see that sentiment becoming to prevalent.