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Comment by WolfeReader | Hacker News Reader

Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly.

The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.

The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.

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You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid.

AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios.

To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?

Easy: counting letters in a word. There are tons of examples where AI confidently presents incorrect letter counts as fact. Search it up, really! Good example article: https://wonderfulengineering.com/googles-new-ai-search-think...

If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question.

You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.

First of all, that's already a solved problem for current frontier models. Give me a specific example if you don't believe me.

Second of all, not being able to properly spell a word doesn't mean one doesn't have a semantic understanding of the concepts the word represent. Do you think an illiterate person is incapable of intelligence?

I already gave a specific example. And since your second paragraph shows that you don't understand what generative AI even is or how it works, you have got some learning due before you continue to discuss AI.

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