chapotraphouse

LLMs are categorically not AI, they're overgrown text parsers based on predicting text. They do not store knowledge, they do not acquire knowledge, they're basically just that little bit of speech processing that your brain does to help you read and parse text better, but massively overgrown and bloated in an attempt to make that also function as a mimicry of general knowledge. That's why they hallucinate and are constantly wrong about anything that's not a rote answer from their training data: because they do not actually have any sort of thinking bits or mental model or memory, they're just predicting text based on a big text log and their prompts.

They're vaguely interesting toys, though not for how ludicrously expensive they are to actually operate, but they represent a fundamentally wrong approach that's receiving an obscene amount of resources to trying to make it not suck without any real results to show for it. The sorts of math and processing involved in how they work internally have broader potential, but these narrowly focused chatbots suck and are a dead end.