logoalt Hacker News

procaryoteyesterday at 7:28 AM1 replyview on HN

> First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete. This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X".

Lots of things are Turing complete. We don't usually think they're smart, unless it's the first time we see a computer and have no idea how it works

An LLM is a markov chain mathematically. We can build an LLM with a context window of one token and it's basically a token frequency table. We can make the context window bigger and it becomes better at generating plausible looking text.

Is it possible that beyond becoming better at generating plausible looking text – the expected and observed outcome – it also gains some actual intelligence? It's very hard to disprove, but occam's razor might not be kind to it.


Replies

ACCount37yesterday at 10:36 AM

Again, you're taking a shortcut. "Markov chain" as an excuse to declare "no intelligence".

It would be much more honest to say "LLMs are not intelligent because I don't want them to be". Would also explain why you overlook the ever-mounting pile of tasks that were thought to require intelligence, and that LLMs now casually beat an average (presumably intelligent) human at.

show 1 reply