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Comment by hptnrr | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.

This is most egregious in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example. Would Carlsen have won game six against Nepo if Nepo had had a tablebase? No, it was a draw many times.

Hacker culture has slowly been subverted since the mediocre developers of open source projects sold out to corporations and became managers of the A developers. Literally like pg wrote: C students manage the A students. Except that in open source this was a novelty and the A students were too timid or conflict averse to fork.

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>ChatGPT does not know more than you.

Maybe in the area of your expertise, but ChatGPT probably knows most of the Habsburg dynasty. (just as one example) The breadth of knowledge, even when the depth is quirky and limited, is genuinely a big deal.

> ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.

If the human needs a literature references and a database to answer a question, can they be said to "know" the answer?

ChatGPT doesn't have an endgame database for chess. Despite having "read" all the literature about chess, it will hallucinate the board state if you try to play chess with it directly. But it "knows" how to write a chess engine that would beat me… and more than that, one which would beat a competent player.

It is a very weird and spiky form of intelligence, but it's also definitely not just a database.

If Stockfish uses a table base to play endgames, does it play chess?

If a CPU needs RAM and disk access to give answers, does it "know" the material?

> If Stockfish uses a table base to play endgames, does it play chess?

It would be very impressive to watch this, but irrelevant:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22table+base%22&t=osx&ia=images&i...

> If a CPU needs RAM and disk access to give answers, does it "know" the material?

If you need to have a prefrontal cortex (RAM) and hippocampus (disk access), same question. (The answer is "yes, obviously that's fine, why would you even ask").

> in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example

You / Carlsen / anyone will not beat a top chess engine even without the endgame databases. In the vast majority of cases you / anyone won't even reach that part (7piece / 8piece for some positions).

> ChatGPT does not know more than you

Yes, yes it does. Your fallacy is that you confuse knowledge with "knowing what to do when you don't have that knowledge". But in pure raw knowledge (definitions, trivia, bits of history, etc) chatbots are oom over any human being. Just try any of the "benchmarks" gamified by people.

LLms are a cleverly encoded database. It is a lookup.

A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs. A bit slower of course. Most of the time an encyclopedia would suffice and be more accurate than the hallucinating ghosts in the machine.

EDIT: The insane downvoters can go back to their AI girlfriends. The comment was meant for thinking people.

I like to think of LLMs as a compressed knowledge base that you explore, navigate via prompts. Unfortunately the heavy post training from ai labs obfuscate that way too much IMHO

A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs.

This is called the "Chinese Room" argument, postulating that a human equipped with a Borgesian library of reference books in a language he doesn't understand and a symbolic lookup table for that language can emulate a thinking human mind without actually thinking.

It was controversial for decades, and is now known not to hold up at all. (Or to hold up perfectly, if unlike Searle your goal is to show that human minds are nothing all that special.) To the extent that the room's occupant succeeds at a task that requires thinking, he is thinking... end of story. Simulated intelligence is now known, thanks to LLMs, to be indistinguishable from real intelligence.

Ask the operator of a Chinese room, who doesn't know Chinese or math, for a novel proof of an unsolved conjecture. The LLM can give you one, but your hypothetical reference librarian won't even know what to look up at first. By the time they learn, the core premise of the argument will no longer hold true.

> Simulated intelligence is now known, thanks to LLMs, to be indistinguishable from real intelligence.

Oooff, that's quite the claim. Why don't you try to back it up? Cite some research.

Last time I checked it was still very possible to distinguish "reasoning" LLMs from Real People.

The fact that you don't know whether you're talking to an LLM or a human right now is good enough for me.

The "last time you checked" was evidently 2023 or so. I suggest checking again.

> The fact that you don't know whether you're talking to an LLM or a human right now is good enough for me.

Uh huh. So you have no evidence, and can't prove shit. That's what I figured.

LLMs are nothing but a shallow mirror of human thought, they don't hold up to any serious examination and the only people who think they do are typically narcissists who can't form deep connections with real people. The superficiality of LLMs is not apparent to these fans, because they have never managed to connect with the depth and inner world of another human.

You hate to see it. It's like watching somebody about to be hit by a bus. You scream, you wave your arms, but they either don't see you, or they think you're some kind of nut and ignore you.

Then, the next thing that goes through their mind -- the last thing -- is a chrome hood ornament shaped like a greyhound.

Oh so you do get it! All these idiots running around acting like a calculator can think. The bus is really going to hurt when they hit 40 and realize they outsourced all their humanity to a machine. Art, writing, even reading - these dorks hand it all over to chatGPT. Then they go online and act like they’re more productive than ever, when all they can produce is a dribbling stream of liquid shit.

As it happens, https://www.imo2026.com/ is coming up next week in Shanghai. Grab your best calculator, let's see how you do without thinking.

> let's see how you do without thinking

That’s your domain buddy, not mine.

I don't make much distinction between "knows" and "has the knowledge" when it comes to LLMs.

FWIW it’s considered bad form on HN to comment on downvotes. Better to just take the loss and move on, it’s not like the karma matters (see the guideline page)

ChatGPT does not know more than you.

You'd have to be deluded or deranged to believe that. Even if it does nothing else, it "knows" more than any human alive.

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