Post #2821025

2026-04-16 14:23 UTC

So it seems to me that while most of the LLM-based systems we see today are a resource-intensive party trick with many ruinous side-effects, there's something very much more interesting about the core technology, and that THAT may ultimately prove to be one of the tools in the toolbox for whoever finally Frankensteins together something that we might cautiously call intelligent. And that's why I quibble with @pluralistic@mamot.fr's “will not lead to intelligence" line. 11/

Replies (4)

@angusm@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 14:28

Also, on a side note, the question of “can we make intelligent systems?" may be a distraction; we're now facing a world in which we have to live alongside increasing numbers of near-intelligent or pseudo-intelligent or just very-good-at-making-you-think-they're-intelligent systems, and that will have “interesting” consequences. I touched on that in an essay at https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2023/09/08/familiar-daemons/, but I don't think we’ve yet grasped how much these fake intelligences are about to change our world. /END

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@Phosphenes@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 14:49

@angusm@mastodon.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr Yes. If we assume human intelligence is a grab bag of ingredients, the chances that one of those ingredients is like an artificial neural network goes up. Not the whole thing, just some components, like visual cortex or speech centers. It's even more likely considering how ANNs both succeed (object recognition) and fail (hallucinations) similarly to ourselves. 'My AI ate social media for a year and now it just bullshits.' Yeah that never happens to people.

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@n_dimension@infosec.exchange 2026-04-16 15:11

@angusm@mastodon.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr On this we agree. Pluralistic serves useful function. But he has reached the level of adulation where hubris is getting to his head. He is also a #hypocrite, he uses #Ai to aid his writing, it's "only" a local model but the line he draws is absolute, and his excuses don't marry up with his butlerian jihad rhetoric

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@pianosaurus@c.im 2026-04-16 15:28

@angusm@mastodon.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr It also seems to me we have all collectively forgotten that today's LLMs are built on multiple ideas that are individually useful. Embeddings, for example, are under-utilised and super-interesting on their own. I would not be surprised if our brain partly operate on similar ideas.

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