David Shipley

So the biggest thing that people need to know is that these tools

are not actually intelligent.

They're high-speed idiots, and at best, they're what's referred to as stochastic parrots.

What do I mean by that?

So first, they're a parrot.

They have no idea what they're saying.

So imagine you got a whole bunch of parrots together that had different phrases and you put them in one giant room and you walked in to listen to it.

It would sound crazy, hilarious, maybe semi-coherent, the odd time,

but not real, not real, substantive, understood conversations.

Now, the other one, the big word there, stochastic, it refers to the same word as statistics.

These machine models pick the most likely thing to say given the context they're provided.

They just do math.

And so they have no idea what the meaning of the words are.

It's why they cannot tell you how many letters are the word strawberry originally, because they don't actually know language.

They know how to fake language.

Yeah, and it's interesting because Jeffrey Dawkins has written a really good book called A Thousand Brains, which is doing for lay people to understand the state of artificial intelligence, what Charles Darwin's The Evolution or The Origin of the Species did for biology.

And Dawkins makes a really clear case that we're not going to get to superintelligence with large language models.

And it's pretty simple.

We go back to the human being.

When we climbed out of the ooze, we didn't climb out talking.