Fuck AI

even LLM development, trying to copy the way brains work

no, i'm gonna stop you right there. llms weren't made to mimic human brain, or anything like this, llms were made as tools to study language. it's categorically impossible for llms to provide anything leading to agi; these things don't think, don't research, don't hallucinate, don't have agency, cognition, don't have working memory the way humans do; these things do one thing and one thing only: generate string of tokens that were most likely to follow given prompt, given what was in the training data. that's it; that's all that there's to it; i know you were promised superhuman intelligence in a box but if you're using a chatbot, all intelligence there is is your own; if you think otherwise you're falling for massive ELIZA effect, a thing that has been around for fifty years now, augmented by blizzard of openai marketing propaganda, helped by tech journalists that never questioned these hypesters, funded by fake nerd billionaires of silicon valley that misremembered old scifi and went around building torment nexii, but i digress

Where does intelligence come from? Can it be duplicated in other ways?

i'm not saying that intelligence is exclusively always entirely biological thing, but i do think that state of neuroscience, psychology, and also computational side of research is woefully short of anything resembling pathway to solution to this problem. instead, this is what i think it's going to happen:

llms are dead end in this sense, but also these things take bulk of ai/ml funding now, so all these other approaches are ignored in terms of funding. historically, after every period of intense hype of this nature comes ai winter; this one is bound to happen too, and it might be worse since it looks like it also fueled investment bubble propping up large part of american economy, so when bubble pops, on top of historically usual negative sentiment stemming from overpromising and underdelivering there's gonna be resentment about aibros worming their way to management and causing mass layoffs, replacing juniors with idiot boxes and lobotomizing any future seniors pipeline etc etc.

what typically happened next is that steady supply of research in cs/math departments of many universities accumulated over low tens of years, and when some new good enough development happened, and everyone forgot previous failures, hype train starts again. this step will be slowed down by both current american administration cutting off funding to many types of research, and incoming bubble crash that will make people remember what kind of thing aibros are up to for a long time.

when, not if, most credulous investors' money including softbank thrown into openai gets burnt through, which i think might take couple of years tops, i would be very surprised if any of these overgrown startups doesn't become a smoking crater within five years, very few people will want to have anything to do with this all, and when the next ai spring happens, it might be well into 40s, 50s, and by then i guess that climate change effects will be too strong to ignore and just try and catch another hype train, there are gonna be much more pressing issues. this is why i think that anything resembling agi won't come up during my lifetime, and if you want to discuss gpt41 overlords in year 3107, feel free to discuss it with someone else.