[sam0x17]

If you subscribe to extended mind theory and Merleau Ponty's brand of phenomenology, tools are just an extension of your cognitive process, and "shelling out" in this way is really to be expected of high intelligence, if not consciousness. Some would say it might even be a prerequisite for consciousness, that you need to be a being-in-the-world etc etc

Not to say that GPT is conscious, in its current form I think it certainly isn't, but rather I would say reasoning is a positive development, not an embarrassing one

I can't compute 297298*248 immediately in my head, and if I were to try it I'd have to hobble through a multiplicaion algorithm, in my head... it's quite simlar to what they're doing here, it's just they can wire it right into a real calculator instead of slowly running a shitty algo on wetware

[bonoboTP]

Yeah humans have done this physically for very long. We have puny little teeth but have knives and butchering tools much better than any animal's teeth. We have little hair, but make clothes that can keep us warm in the arctic or even in space. We have an underdeveloped colon and digestive system, but instead we pre-digest the food by cooking it on fire. In some sense the stove is part of our digestive system, the jacket is part of our dermis (like the shell of a snail, except we build it through a different process), and we have external teeth in the form of utensils and stone tools.

Now, ideally, the LLMs could also design their own tools, when they realize there is a recurring task that can be accomplished better and more reliably by coding up a tool.

[eikenberry]

Heidegger ready-to-hand is another take on this same idea. Something I took to heart years ago and was a big part of my using and contributing to free software as much as possible. Proprietary software is a form of mind control along these lines of thought and I don't like that one bit.