Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My skepticism of AI safety is just because of skepticism of AI generally. These are amazing things, but I don't believe the technology is even a road to AGI. Thanks for your response. I'm curious how to state your claim in a way that you would feel is accurate. Would you say "LLMs are not a road to AGI"? I put ~zero weight on what an arbitrary person believes until they clarify their ideas, show me their model, and…
Yes I'm talking about LLMs in particular. I'm in the stochastic parrot camp. Though I could be convinced humans are no more than stochastic parrots, in which case it does have a path for development of AGI. If I'm right the breakthroughs will plateau even while applications of the technology continue to advance for the next several years.
Sure, optimization based on predicting the next word is indeed the base optimizer for LLMs. This doesn't prevent the resulting behavior from demonstrating behavior that corresponds with some measurable levels of intelligence, as in problem-solving in particular domains! Nor does it prevent fine-tuning from modifying the LLMs behavior considerably.
One might say e.g. "LLMs only learn to predict the next word." The word only is misleading. Yes, models learn to predict the next word, and they build a lot of internal structures to help them do that. These structures enable capabilities much greater than merely parroting text. This is a narrow claim, but it is enough to do serious damage to the causal wielder of the "stochastic parrots" phrase. (To be clear, I'm not making any claims about consciousness or human-anchored notions of intelligence.)