I was saying something like this a few years ago when people were getting first excited about ChatGPT. The gap has narrowed, but not by as much as people think.
AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously), it's so good at looking like an expert, they might believe that it is an expert. But the moment you ask someone to use it for something they're an expert in themselves, the holes appear wide, consistent & obvious.
My favourite moment of seeing this in action was watching AI-worrier TV host/comedian Bill Maher. He has spent years talking about the dangers of AI taking everyone's jobs, destroying civilisation, ruining the economy, starting wars, "it's just getting better and better all the time", and so on. But one night he let slip a tell. "It's no good at writing jokes. Not yet, anyway". There you go, Bill... connect those dots...
There is real utility in it being a tool to help experts apply their expertise, as in this story where it speeds up some tasks to help the translator do part of the work, enhance their expertise, allow them to be more productive.
It's a better screwdriver, a better hammer, in the hands of somebody who knows what needs a screwdriver or a hammer. It doesn't replace them. It can't replace them. It's a tool that enhances the human, not an alternative.
I don't understand why this is not widely understood yet, but I'm sure it will in due course.
And I don't expect this to change. Even if the latest model scores 100% on every benchmark, all that really tells us is that it's now more productive/efficient than it was before at helping experts do that work, not that it can replace everyone in that category of work.
Insightful comment, but I'm wondering if you would comment on why? You said you don't expect this to change. Do you think there's some limit inherent to any cybernetic 'mind' that simply cannot be overcome by any amount of advancement in the currently-known types of research? Is this specifically about LLMs?
For me, I simply don't know. I know that I have a soul, but I'm still not sure if my brain's output could or could not be perfectly replicated by a simulation, or, to propose a much easier experiment, if a simulation of a brain could be made and trained, if it would be distinguishable in its output from a real brain.
I think the human mind is more complicated than regurgitation. I think repeating things we've seen is key to learning and reasoning, but there's a ton of other stuff we don't full understand that LLMs are not even attempting to solve for.
To get to being able to simulate it, I am reminded of the Borges story On Exactitude in Science [0], where we end up just building, well, an actual brain. Can we do that within 3 orders of magnitude as efficiently as the sum of human evolution in our lifetimes? I doubt it.
AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously), it's so good at looking like an expert, they might believe that it is an expert. But the moment you ask someone to use it for something they're an expert in themselves, the holes appear wide, consistent & obvious.
My favourite moment of seeing this in action was watching AI-worrier TV host/comedian Bill Maher. He has spent years talking about the dangers of AI taking everyone's jobs, destroying civilisation, ruining the economy, starting wars, "it's just getting better and better all the time", and so on. But one night he let slip a tell. "It's no good at writing jokes. Not yet, anyway". There you go, Bill... connect those dots...
There is real utility in it being a tool to help experts apply their expertise, as in this story where it speeds up some tasks to help the translator do part of the work, enhance their expertise, allow them to be more productive.
It's a better screwdriver, a better hammer, in the hands of somebody who knows what needs a screwdriver or a hammer. It doesn't replace them. It can't replace them. It's a tool that enhances the human, not an alternative.
I don't understand why this is not widely understood yet, but I'm sure it will in due course.
And I don't expect this to change. Even if the latest model scores 100% on every benchmark, all that really tells us is that it's now more productive/efficient than it was before at helping experts do that work, not that it can replace everyone in that category of work.