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Comment by drummojg | Hacker News Reader

I would be perfectly satisfied with the ST:TNG Computer. Knows all, knows how to do lots of things, feels nothing.

In Mass Effect, there is a distinction made between AI (which is smart enough to be considered a person) and VI (virtual intelligence, basically a dumb conversational UI over some information service).

What we have built in terms of LLMs barely qualifies as a VI, and not a particularly reliable one. I think we should begin treating and designing them as such, emphasizing responding to queries and carrying out commands accurately over friendliness. (The "friendly" in "user-friendly" has done too much anthropomorphization work. User-friendly non-AI software makes user choices, and the results of such choices, clear and responds unambiguously to commands.)

A bit of a retcon but the TNG computer also runs the holodeck and all the characters within it. There's some bootleg RP fine tune powering that I tell you hwat.

It's a retcon? How else would the holdeck possibly work, there's only one (albeit highly modular) computer system on the ship.

I mean it depends on what you consider the "computer", the pile of compute and storage the ship has in that core that got stolen on that one Voyager episode, or the ML model that runs on it to serve as the ship's assistant.

I think it's more believable that the holodeck is ran from separate models that just run inference on the same compute and the ship AI just spins up the containers, it's not literally the ship AI doing that acting itself. Otherwise I have... questions on why starfleet added that functionality beforehand lol.

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