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Top physicist says chatbots are just ‘glorified tape recorders’ (fortune.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Top physicist says chatbots are just ‘glorified tape recorders’::Leading theoretical physicist Michio Kaku predicts quantum computers are far more important for solving mankind’s problems.

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[–] 73 points 3 years ago (2 children)

A physicist is not gonna know a lot more about language models than your average college grad.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    That's absolute nonsense. Physicists have to be excellent statisticians and, unlike data scientists, statisticians have to understand where the data is coming from, not just how to spit out simple summaries of enormously complex datasets as if it had any meaning without context.

    And his views are exactly in line with pretty much every expert who doesn't have a financial stake in hyping the high tech magic 8-ball. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I had that paper in mind when I said that. Doesn't exhibit a very thorough understanding of how these models actually work.

    A common argument is that the human brain very well may work the exact same, ergo the common phrase, "I'm a stochastic parrot and so are you."

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    That's a Sam Altman line and all it shows is that he does not know how knowledge is acquired, developed, or applied. He has no concept of how the world actually works and has likely never thought deeply about anything in his life beyond how to grift profitably. And he can't afford to examine his (professed) beliefs because he's trying to cash out on a doomed fantasy before too many people realise it is doomed.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Okay but LLMs have multiplied my productivity far more than any tape recorder ever could or ever will. The statement is absolute nonsense.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    Do you imagine that music did not exist before we had the means to record it? Or that it had no effect on the productivity of musicians?

    Vinyl happened before tape but in the early days of computers, tape was what we used to save data and code. Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.

    Could you expand on this? Sounds interesting.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    They just played the tapes on TV, kinda screechy, computer-y sounds. They'd tell you when to press record on your cassette player before they started. You'd hold it close to the TV speakers until it finished playing, then plug the cassete player in to your computer, and there'd be some simple free game to play. I didn't believe it would work but it did. I still don't believe it worked. But it did.

    There must be a clip somewhere on the internet but my search skills are nowhere near good enough to find one.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    [New comment instead of editing the old so that you see it]

    I managed to find a video of an old skool game loading. That's what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it's exactly what they'd play on the TV so you could create your tape.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Thank you very much for the effort! I also searched for text or video, but found none.

    I understand now what you previously meant, streaming code via TV.

    That’s what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it’s exactly what they’d play on the TV so you could create your tape.

    Now I have a new confusion: Why would they let the speaker play the bits being processed? It surely was technically possible to load a program into memory without sending anything to the speaker. Or wasn't it, and it was a technical necessity? Or was it an artistic choice?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I assume it was because they used ordinary tape recorders, that people would otherwise use as dictaphones or to play music. I guess there wasn't a way to transfer the data silently because the technology was designed to play sound? We had to wait for the floppy disk for silent-ish loading. Ish because they click-clacked a lot, but that was moving parts rather than the code itself.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Your statement and the original one can both be in sync with another.

    Microsoft Word is just a glorified notepad but it still improves my productivity significantly.

    And everyone will have different uses depending on their needs. Chatgpt has done nothing for my productivity/usually adds work as I have to double check all the nonsensical crap it gives me for example and then correct it.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    Those are all gross oversimplifications. By the same logic the internet is just a glorified telephone, the computer is a glorified abacus, the telephone is just a glorified messenger pigeon. There are lots of people who don't understand LLMs and exaggerate its capabilities but dismissing it is also bad.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Nope. Biologists also use statistical models and also know where the data is coming from etc etc. They are not experts in AI. This Michio Kaku guy is more like the African American Science Guy to me, more concerned with being a celeb.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    Biologists are (often) excellent statisticians too, you're correct. That's why the most successful quants are biologists or physicists, despite not having trained in finance.

    They're not experts in (the badly misnamed) AI. They're experts in the statistical models AI uses. They know an awful lot more than the likes of Sam Altman and the AI-hypers. Because they're trained specialists, not techbro grifters.

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