alt Hacker News> There are some things LLMs cannot do, or at least do well, at any size, at infinite size and with infinite compute, simply due to the very nature of what LLMs are to begin with.
How can we be so confident that there is anything LLMs fundamentally cannot do? Proving that impossibility seems hard.
Drawing trend lines far into the future is foolish, but the recent trend is clear and its not obvious how much more progress is needed before they start having a meaningful impact on more aspects of life.
> not whether they are an emerging alien intelligence with civilisation-threatening capabilities.
The people building them are explicitly attempting to do this. They may not succeed, but what if they do? Seems worth considering that scenario.
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LLM utility is exponential with increased LLM capability. Even if improvements to LLMs slow down their impact will continue to increase. And there is no evidence LLMs are slowing down. In fact improvements still seem to be accelerating.
> How can we be so confident that there is anything LLMs fundamentally cannot do? Proving that impossibility seems hard.
This is where applied business programmers part ways with philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists. However, the lack of an inner model of the world is a formidable limitation, while the reliability of purely statistical-inferential processes will never be adequate for some basic building blocks of modernity.