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azakaitoday at 3:25 AM1 replyview on HN

If you want examples of this, see the recent book "The AI Con"

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/217432753-the-ai-con

which describes LLMs as "souped-up autocomplete", complex statistics that cannot truly understand anything. A more recent example is this paper:

https://zenodo.org/records/20071869

which says,

> [LLMs], as turbo-charged statistical models (recall their formal relation to logistic regression) can only but provide correlations.

And, of course, the Stochastic Parrot paper is the classic example in this area. It is from 5 years ago, but "LLMs only do statistics / can't understand" is very much alive and active among academics, even if it is a minority position.


Replies

root_axistoday at 3:30 AM

None of those arguments claim "LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity"

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