Reid Hoffman and Bill Gates celebrated LLMs passing the AP Biology exam as the biggest tech advance since the GUI. But the speaker argues LLMs just match statistical patterns in text, not true intelligence. Real intelligence requires causal understanding of how the world actually works.
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I was just listening to Reid Hoffman's new podcast, Possible, which is where he's optimistic about the future, which is a good intention. And he's talking about how impressive it is that these large language models can solve the AP Bio exam. And he's talking about this time he showed Bill Gates this, this in practice, and Bill Gates said it was the most impressive thing he's seen since the graphical user interface. And I just think that this is misleading because intelligence is so much more than induction, which is what these systems are using. And it requires a deep understanding of cause and effect and the world. And these systems don't really understand what they're thinking. Like, they're just, you know, doing some statistical analysis on text. And that's impressive in its own way, but it certainly doesn't amount to intelligence. And I think it's part of this larger sort of overhyped mythology of artificial intelligence that's being pushed right now.