this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Well, you described pretty well what llms were trained to do. But from there you can't derive how they are doing it. Maybe they don't have real knowledge, or maybe they do. Right now literally no one can definitively claim one way or the other, not even top of the field ML researchers. (They may have opinions though)
I think it's perfectly justified to hate AI, but it's better to have a less biased view of what it is.
I don't hate AI or LLMs. As much as it might mess up civilization as we know it, I'd like to see the technological singularity during my lifetime, though I think the fixation on LLMs will do more to delay than realize that.
I just think that there's a lot of people fooled by their conversational capability into thinking they are more than what they are and using the fact that these models are massive with billions or trillions of weighs that the data is encoded into and no one understands how they work to the point of being able to definitively say "this is why it suggested glue as a pizza topping" to put whether or not it approaches AGI in a grey zone.
I'll agree though that it was maybe too much to say they don't have knowledge. "Having knowledge" is a pretty abstract and hard to define thing itself, though I'm also not sure it directly translates to having intelligence (which is also poorly defined tbf). Like one could argue that encyclopedias have knowledge, but they don't have intelligence. And I'd argue that LLMs are more akin to encyclopedias than how we operate (though maybe more like a chatbot dictionairy that pretends to be an encyclopedia).
Leaving aside the questions whether it would benefit us, what makes you think LLM won't bring about technical singularity? Because, you know, the word LLM doesn't mean that much... It just means it's a model, that is "large" (currently taken to mean many parameters), and is capable of processing languages.
Don't you think whatever that will bring about the singularity, will at the very least understand human languages?
So can you clarify, what is it that you think won't become AGI? Is it transformer? Is it any models that trained in the way we train llms today?
It's because they are horrible at problem solving and creativity. They are based on word association from training purely on text. The technical singularity will need to innovate on its own so that it can improve the hardware it runs on and its software.
Even though github copilot has impressed me by implementing a 3 file Python script from scratch to finish such that I barely wrote any code, I had to hold its hand the entire way and give it very specific instructions about every function as we added the pieces one by one to build it up. And even then, it would get parts I failed to specify completely wrong and initially implemented things in a very inefficient way.
There are fundamental things that the technical singularity needs that today's LLMs lack entirely. I think the changes that would be required to get there will also change them from LLMs into something else. The training is a part of it, but fundamentally, LLMs are massive word association engines. Words (or vectors translated to and from words) are their entire world and they can only describe things with those words because it was trained on other people doing that.