The merits are real. I do understand the deep mistrust people have for tech companies, but there’s far too much throwing out of the baby with the bath water.

As a solo developer, LLMs are a game-changer. They’ve allowed me to make amazing progress on some of my own projects that I’ve been stuck on for ages.

But it’s not just technical subjects that benefit from LLMs. ChatGPT has been a great travel guide for me. I uploaded a pic of some architecture in Berlin and it went into the history of it, I asked it about some damage to an old church in Spain - turned out to be from the Spanish civil war, where revolutionaries had been mowed down by Franco’s firing squads.

Just today, I was getting help from an LLM for an email to a Portuguese removals company. I sent my message in English with a Portuguese translation, but the guy just replied back with a single sentence in broken English:

“Yes a can , need tho mow m3 you need delivery after e gif the price”

The first bit is pretty obviously “Yes I can” but I couldn’t really be sure what he was trying to say with the rest of it. So I asked ChatGPT who responded:

It seems he’s saying he can handle the delivery but needs to know the total volume (in cubic meters) of your items before he can provide a price. Here’s how I’d interpret it:

“Yes, I can [do the delivery]. I need to know the [volume] in m³ for delivery, and then I’ll give you the price.”

Thanks to LLMs, I’m able to accomplish so many things that would have previously taken multiple internet searches and way more effort.

Only a French would ever dare to wear such a violently vomit-hued watch 😂

I certainly am not surprised that OpenAI, Google and so on are overstating the capabilities of the products they are developing and currently selling. Obviously it’s important for the public at large to be aware that you can’t trust a company to accurately describe products it’s trying to sell you, regardless of what the product is.

I am more interested in what academics have to say though. I expect them to be more objective and have more altruistic motivations than your typical marketeer. The reason I asked how you would define intelligence was really just because I find it an interesting area of thought which fascinates me and has done long before this new wave of LLMs hit the scene. It’s also one which does not have clear answers, and different people will have different insights and perspectives. There are different concepts which are often blurred together: intelligence, being clever, being well educated, and consciousness. I personally consider all of these to be separate concepts, and while they may have some overlap, they nevertheless are all very different things. I have met many people who have very little formal education but are nonetheless very intelligent. And in terms of AI and LLMs, I believe that an LLM does encapsulate some degree of genuine intelligence - they appear to somehow encode a model of the universe in their billions of parameters and they are able to meaningfully respond to natural language questions on almost any subject - however an LLM is unquestionably not a conscious being.

You’re right that we need a clear definition of intelligence if we are to make any predictions about achieving AGI. The researchers behind this article appear to mean “human-level cognition” which doesn’t seem to be a particularly objective or useful yardstick. To begin with, which human are we talking about? If they’re talking about an idealised maximally intelligent human, then I don’t think we should be surprised that we aren’t about to achieve that. The goal is not to recreate human cognition as if that’s some kind of holy grail. The goal is to make intelligent systems which can give results which are at least as good as what would be produced by a skilled and well-trained human working on the same problem.

Can I ask you how you would define intelligence? And in particular, how would you - if you would at all - differentiate intelligence from being clever, or from being well educated?

I taught myself to touch-type when I was a schoolkid using something similar to Mavis Beacon. All the while, I had a voice in my head saying, “This is pointless, everyone will be talking to their computers like in Star Trek in a couple of years”. Well, that was the 90s and it turned out to be one of the most useful skills I taught myself - but surely the age of the keyboard must soon be coming to an end now??

Eh, that’s pretty metal.

It’s definitely pretty, and as thermite is a mixture of metal powder and metal oxide, your statement is entirely correct.

ah they were making a nice and lame pun (anova brand == another brand)

Heroic works really well. I’ve just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I’ve only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they’re working perfectly, running via proton.

The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.

I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc

Yes it totally does. My teachers got a load of disembodied teeth when I was about 6, and we tied them to string and left them suspended in various drinks. The ones in coca cola had completely disappeared by the end of the experiment.

Those poor Iranians

I suggest you try to analyse the data. Iranians have a very high energy usage per capita - at least as high as any EU country and probably higher. The country is a major oil and gas producer, and the population is accustomed to cheap petrol prices due to heavy subsidisation by the government. You won’t find many Iranians opting to use public transport for the good of the environment. Like Americans, they would rather sit in their own air-conditioned vehicles in interminable traffic jams.

… just don’t tell them it was with yourself

I find your comment interesting because you are implying that some people believe being stupid or clever is a permanent unchangeable state. Presumably one is born as either one or the other?

I would say that some ways of thinking are stupid. In particular when one does not challenge one’s assumptions. It’s possible to build a whole world of stupid on top of bad assumptions. If someone’s entire worldview is built in this way - a whole load of bad assumptions held together with poor logic and wishful thinking - I don’t think they’re even living in the real world any more, they’re living in a fantasy land.

Throwing freighters in there like that is a bit sneaky lol The amount of freighter traffic must dwarf that of cruise ships. Anyway, people on cruise ships are mostly not particularly rich. They’re pretty much just water-borne holiday camps.

Capitalism requires coercion to function. The ‘incentive’ is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter.

You’re thinking of nature. It’s nature that does that.

And it’s what we humans are fighting against, the natural order of things. Nature doesn’t care about the weak, it doesn’t care about justice. We’re in a battle to design and build systems that we can install on top of nature and which do provide those things. There is still much to be done, but over the course of human history we have accomplished a lot and we are in a better place today than we have ever been.

The term capitalism has become a meme, conveying little meaning, just a word we can invoke to rally others in a brief cathartic moment of finger pointing and doom-saying. If it’s what you want to do then fine, go ahead and when you finish, wash your hands and clear your mind, then come back and help think of positive steps forward we can make as a society.

It’s worth mentioning that the word bilingual has different meanings in US English and in British English.

For native British speakers, someone who is bilingual is someone who speaks two languages at a native level, while the accepted US meaning is someone who can speak two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

With the British definition, it’s pretty clear whether someone is bilingual or not. Most people are not, and it’s almost impossible for an adult to become bilingual later in life. Generally it only happens when someone has two parents each with a different mother tongue.

The US meaning is much wider than the British one, and I guess it’s the meaning you’re intending with your question. It basically comes down to the definition of fluent. It’s completely possible to be fluent in a language while still having a foreign accent and still making the occasional grammar mistake. My personal definition of fluency is when you are able to talk to native speakers on pretty much any subject without serious misunderstandings. You don’t need to know every word you may encounter, as you can simply ask the other person what a word means just as native speakers do all the time.

Well there’s a huge variety of different accents in England, even more if you include the whole UK. British people themselves can struggle understanding other Brits from just 100 or 200 miles down the road. I say that as a Brit - I’ve worked in call centres where there would frequently be Liverpudlians, Geordies, Cornish etc calling back in a rage after being hung up on multiple times by colleagues who couldn’t understand them.

I’m gonna guess you’re a Windows user :D