This comment prompted a lot of reflection, so thank you!
I don’t think the blog post claims that LLMs are a long way from human-like intelligence. For what it’s worth, I agree with your reasoning against that line of argument.
My main takeaway from this post’s core about being mindful about the level of abstraction in language. Obviously for technical AI safety, the low-level, mechanistic view seems important. But it also seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to go with high-level anthropomorphic language to motivate people/​make explanations easier. In good written up resources they lead with a fundamental understanding of e.g. how neural nets work (bluedot, global challenges project) but I personally think the movement could still bear this in mind more when introducing AI safety to newcomers. Needless to say hype language is also a problem in mainstream capabilities discussion.
Side note: On the analogy to physics itself, I’m not an expert, but I’ve also been told that the premise of the universe or brain being describable by purely linear maps is contested. Regardless of that, I’m not sure how pragmatically important the analogy is compared to the immediate choice of which abstraction to use for AI safety work.
This comment prompted a lot of reflection, so thank you!
I don’t think the blog post claims that LLMs are a long way from human-like intelligence. For what it’s worth, I agree with your reasoning against that line of argument.
My main takeaway from this post’s core about being mindful about the level of abstraction in language. Obviously for technical AI safety, the low-level, mechanistic view seems important. But it also seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to go with high-level anthropomorphic language to motivate people/​make explanations easier. In good written up resources they lead with a fundamental understanding of e.g. how neural nets work (bluedot, global challenges project) but I personally think the movement could still bear this in mind more when introducing AI safety to newcomers. Needless to say hype language is also a problem in mainstream capabilities discussion.
Side note: On the analogy to physics itself, I’m not an expert, but I’ve also been told that the premise of the universe or brain being describable by purely linear maps is contested. Regardless of that, I’m not sure how pragmatically important the analogy is compared to the immediate choice of which abstraction to use for AI safety work.