alt Hacker NewsIt's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.
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“But they’ve added RL so…!!!”
You are obviously right and I see examples of it everywhere.
E.g I asked Claude opus 4.7 (the latest/greatest) the other day “is a Rimworld year 60 days?”. The reply (paraphrased) “No, a Rimworld year is 4 seasons each of 15 days which is 60 days total”.
Equally, it gets confused about what is a mod or vanilla since it is just predicting based on what it read on forums, which are clearly ambiguous enough (to a dumb text predictor).
Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion. Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction, but now it's common place. As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum. You can describe things by their fundamental functions and make many things sound elementary but I find it counter productive given the capabilities we've seen from this technology
Your house is literally just a box. You can dress it up however you want but it has 4 walls and a lid.
AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you.
Is "text autocomplete" supposed to be an insult? To text auto-complete a physicist I would have to understand physics as well as them. To text-autocomplete your words I would need to model your brain.
By design. At least until we move away from attention being at the core of LLMs
Your brain is also an autocomplete at this point. Notice how you write each word, one after the other, flawlessly
For a good reminder for people on the limitations of AI (or well OAI gpt 5.3 default model for non paying users), I did an experiment recently (Just a week-ish ago): https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/how-many-e-are-in-stra...
image: https://mataroa.blog/images/b5c65214.png
but it says that there are 3 e's in strawberry ;)
Now this is literally something which occurs because of it being text autocomplete and the inherent issue of token based Large language models. So you are literally right :D
My point is that AI can have its issues and it can have its plus points (just like text autocomplete but some suggest its on steroids)
The issue to me feels like we are hammering it in absolutely everything and anything, perhaps it should be used more selectively, y'know, like perhaps a tool?
Sufficiently good text autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence to an impartial observer, and that's the only honest criterion for intelligence.
> It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.
Last year this level of ignorance and cluelessness was amusing. Nowadays it's just sad and disappointing. It's like looking at a computer and downplaying it as something that just flips switches on and off.
Reminds me of when microwaves first came out. Investors decided to go all in on "vibe cooking" (lit. cooking with vibrations) complete with microwave ranges (no conventional oven), until the public wizened up to the fact that there was in fact no cooking (Maillard reaction) involved in their vibe cooking. Took about 15-20 years but microwaves finally took their rightful place as a utility appliance rather than what they were touted as (a centerpiece). Pick up a microwave cookbook from the 50s for some laughs.