Earlier quoted context omitted.
>rightfully so How the hell can people be so confident about this? You describe two smart people reasonably disagreeing about a complicated topic
The LLMs of today are just multidimensional mirrors that contain humanity's knowledge. They don't advance that knowledge, they just regurgitate it, remix it, and expose patterns. We train them. They are very convincing, and show that the Turing test may be flawed. Given that AGI means reaching "any intellectual task that human beings can perform", we need a system that can go beyond lexical reasoning and actually con…
You're right: I haven't seen evidence of LLM novel pattern output that is basically creative.
It can find and remix patterns where there are pre-existing rules and maps that detail where they are and how to use them (ie: grammar, phonics, or an index). But it can't, whatsoever, expose new patterns. At least public facing LLM's can't. They can't abstract.
I think that this is an important distinction when speaking of AI pattern finding, as the language tends to imply AGI behavior.
But abstraction (as perhaps the actual marker of AGI) is so different from what they can do now that it essentially seems to be futurism whose footpath hasn't yet been found let alone traversed.
When they can find novel patterns across prior seemingly unconnected concepts, then they will be onto something. When "AI" begins to see the hidden mirrors so to speak.