alt Hacker NewsCome on, now. That's irrelevant.
Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.
Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.
How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.
Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.
But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""
>Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
I don't know exactly why but I never really understood this argument. Might be some kind of control thing? Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I can argue you can make them perceive reality even better than we (humans) do, just enlarge the audio/video spectrums. Bam...more reality. The whole point of the argument is we're missing information.
Again, I get the need for controlling the environment for what LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be, but that will always cost more than giving them access to like...reality. Same reason I don't really believe in the whole simulation argument, it's just more expensive all around, loses resolution, let alone control. I don't doubt there will be some people that would indulge in neverending hedonism but not all people. You need to give up control for that.