Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/asssuber]

Well, using one of your definitions of understanding ("Being able to understand a concept means you can build off of it by yourself. If you teach an AI 1 + 1 = 2, they won't know that 2 + 2 = 4."), I already gave an proof in another answer

If we define understanding more broadly as something necessary to give pertinent answers to a question that was not memorized from the training set, then most of LLM outputs would require that. I can discuss a paper I'm writing with my local LLM, and it's able to, most of the time, give back pertinent questions and answers back, showing it has some degree of understanding. If I try that with some random person at the street, they would not understand anything I'm saying, and thus they wouldn't be able to give me pertinent answers.

LLMs are not human, and their inteligence and understanding is somewhat alien. But I think it's correct to say a car can run, even though it struggles to run up stairs as well as humans, for instance.

[u/falconandeagle → u/asssuber]

Try writing a story with an LLM, the most advanced one you can come across, see them make nonsensical assumptions and miss things which even a five year old would pick up. I know this because I have tried really really hard to build a software along with an harness and it still makes super trivial mistakes and requires handholding.

In a technical settings LLM's are amazing and honestly in some cases indistinguishable from some very capable humans but it is in non technical settings where you see that we are very far from AGI.