This is fantastic.
@BenAffleck understands and can reasonably explain something that many of the so-called AI "experts" seem determined to over complicate and mislead people on.
In fact, many of these experts are rapidly losing credibility with people who actually understand how this technology works. Unfortunately, they've already convinced a lot of people that AI is something it isn't.
And as the saying goes, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled.
An LLM is a computer program. We designed it. We know the architecture, the mathematics, and how inference works. Much of the underlying code and research is open for anyone to inspect.
All LLMs processes tokens through mathematical operations using learned weights and context to predict what comes next. The results can be astonishingly accurate, useful, and convincing.
But the LLM isn't alive. It doesn't love you, hate you, care about you, or sit around contemplating its existence or understanding.
And yet people insist that somewhere inside those matrix operations, consciousness has magically materialized.
Seriously?
This isn't biological life evolving in nature. It's software executing computations on hardware we designed and built. If you're claiming those computations somehow produce subjective experience, explain the mechanism (I'll wait...).
The remarkable achievement here is that we've created software capable of convincingly emulating aspects of human intelligence and behavior.
That's freakin' amazing and cause to celebrate the technology!
But please stop confusing a computer program with a living, conscious being. It's absolutely not.
The fact that so many people have fallen for that illusion is a testament to how convincing the technology has become.
But here's the clincher: when we misunderstand this, and we start treating computer programs as conscious, independent beings, the legal implications could be disastrous.
Suddenly, "the AI did it" becomes an excuse to shift blame away from the people and companies responsible for building, deploying, and operating these systems.
AI cannot be held accountable. But people and companies can be, and must be held accountable.
Ben gets it. More people should.
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”