https://lwn.net/Articles/982289/
'Simon Willison, co-creator of the popular Django web framework for Python,
gave a keynote presentation at PyCon 2024 on a topic that is unrelated to that
work: large language models (LLMs). The topic grew out of some other work that
he is doing on Datasette, which is a Python-based "tool for exploring and
publishing data". The talk was a look beyond the hype to try to discover what
useful things you can actually do today using these models. Unsurprisingly,
there were some cautionary notes from Willison, as well.
He began by noting that the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was coined by
researchers led by John McCarthy in 1956 as part of a conference that proposed
a two-month, ten-person study of AI. In what was "probably the most legendarily
optimistic piece of software estimation" in history, they suggested that
significant advances in AI could be made by a small group of researchers
working for a summer. "This was 68 years ago. We're beginning to make little
bits of progress on some of these problems now. I love their optimism."
His talk was not going to be about the field of AI, he said, but about a subset
of it: LLMs. These models are used by tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini,
Claude, and Llama. You are hearing a lot about them because they are "really
interesting little things", but he does not think of them as AI, which is a
term that is more of a distraction than anything else at this point. Instead,
he thinks of them as "imitation intelligence".
It turns out that by closely imitating what intelligence looks like, "you can
do really useful and interesting things", but it is important to realize that
the models "are not planning and solving puzzles". They are simply doing an
imitation, not embodying intelligence in any sense.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
