A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long... See more

LLMs are tools that often masquerade as solutions, an unfortunate state of affairs which has led to remarkable amounts of confusion, frustration, rage, and opprobrium. Almost all of the criticisms aimed at their outputs (as opposed to their training) stem from this deceptive category error.

LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.