Alien mind is in my view the best mental model - LLMs are not merely stochastic parrots, are not like humans, are not like animals.
replyThey're maybe nearest to Cthulhu, but that's fictional. In terms of existing mental models "alien minds" feels the best can do.
I agree that "teach how to love" is off and perhaps excessively anthropomorphic. But we don't have good words or concepts for what we really need to do - hence why we should pause.
pretending that it's something like a mind at all is what's misleading. it's more like a cast of a bunch of overlapping/entangled thinkprints, and pushing activation through it produces new prints. it can already "love" because that behaviors in the data along with hate and everything else.
replyacting like the behavior is alien or unexplained is the dishonest part. they know exactly where the behavior comes from - why else spend hundreds of millions securing more and more data sources
the behaviour is alien because it is different from human, they don't know in detail how those trillions thinkprints work together to produce output
replyopenai "knew" about scaling law for a decade now and still can't fully explain it, why you think they are dishonest here?
it feels unhinged and makes me think we should just put every engineer working at these labs in jail to pause this shit until we can figure out what the fuck they are doing over there
replyThe most charitable way I can describe it is just extremely low quality sci-fi fan fiction. I think that's too charitable, because I believe it's far more cynical than that. They're deliberately playing into these sort of techno-religious beliefs that have taken root in the wake of Kurzweil, et al., fanned by LLM psychosis, influencer marketing, and a deluge of this kind of sci-fi marketing copy. It's just chatbots, guys. Relax.
reply