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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

> building AI's that are much more than just LLM

Well, yes, by taking AI to mean something different than the current meaning. Of course if you build something that's not an LLM you may find a way to fix the confabulation* problem, but that isn't fixing what we have now.

The history of 'AI' the term is one of continually redefining it to mean something different, as the winds of technology and business blow. In this case, the assertion is that, under what we currently call 'AI', there's not a fix.

* I prefer the term confabulation over hallucination. See <https://universeodon.com/@siderea/109883198218504351>

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Well, I agree with your general sentiment to a point, but I would say that in the lexicon of the day, "AI" and "LLM" are not synonymous. LLM's are one (current very popular and useful) approach to AI, but only a VERY casual observer would conflate the two terms as being completely equivalent. To me, it goes without saying that the world of AI is bigger than just LLM's.

But since we're talking about an article in Fortune, maybe it's fair to think of this strictly from a lay-person perspective.

Also, to the extent that it matters, I'm not necessarily saying "build something (completely) different than an LLM". I can picture a world with systems that include LLM's that interoperate with other components that do more of the "world model" and "commonsense reasoning" parts, yielding an aggregate system that does more/better than any of the parts could do in isolation.

No argument from me. I see good uses for LLMs, both now, with care, and as part of a toolkit for building towards more general intelligence.

One way to think of LLMs as available now is as sort of thinking partner, much like bouncing ideas off another person, except LLMs use the ideas of entire communities of persons. Of course some of the ideas bounced back at you from thousands or millions of people are going to get things wrong. Don't be like the lawyers who blindly used ChatGPT to write their legal briefs without even checking the citations, and you'll be OK.

From 2008 there was How to Build a Person by John Pollock. I don't recall whether he included some putative "explainer" disciplined by other components.

Heh. Seems to be a common pattern in book titles. There are also How to Build A Brain[1] by Chris Eliasmith and How To Create A Mind[2] by Ray Kurzweil as well.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Brain-Architecture-Architec...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/1...

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