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I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust.

And especially not now. Not when LLMs can already do pretty much anything that a human can - and some of those things they can even do well.



>I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust.

But you just did. You're praising the man behind the curtain and treating it as the pixie dust you dismissed.


Given that everything the LLM can do it learned from human descriptions of the space ... one would have to posit a very inefficient language for that model not to do something with those billions of parameters. But when you fly because of a bunch of balloons sprinkled with magic fairy dust are pulling you up, the magic fairy dust is still at work.


Before LLMs, it wasn't even clear how much expressive power human languages have when divorced from the innate properties of human mind or other sensory inputs.

An LLM being able to pick up on so many features of human mind, despite not being innately human, just by looking at the text-only language data? Not an outcome everyone expected. Far from it.


That is true, I'm glad that LLMs at least demonstrated for everyone except the most committed solipsists that we are all talking about a shared world state and communicating at least moderately effectively with each other.




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