The more I use language models, the more monstrous they seem to me. I don’t mean that in a partic­u­larly negative sense. Frankenstein’s monster is sad, but also amazing. Godzilla is a monster, and Godzilla rules.

language models are not intelligent in the ways that even small children are intelligent, but they are already superhuman at tasks like summarization, translation (both linguistic and conceptual), and association. And when you apply those skills to artfully curated source material written by equally, but differently, gifted humans, magic can happen... See more

these models are not “intelligences.” People mistake them for entities with volition, even sentience. This is because of the anthropomorphic fallacy: people tend to think of other things as humans if you give them half an excuse. But it is also because of a linguistic mistake: we call them AI, “artificial intelligence.”

Language models are not being... See more

Can large language models take the place of traditional search engines? For us to have confidence in them, we would need to know that they haven’t been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories—we’d need to know that the jpeg is capturing the right sections of the Web. But, even if a large language model includes only the information we want

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