The first time I saw GPT spit out perfect code I felt it, the magic! Immediately I started wondering: will AI do my work for me? What am I going to do?..
I still see people fall for this, especially each time new models are released.
AI is such an impressive technology it’s easy to start believing that it can think. It can hold a conversation better than I can, it knows more than my college professor. Maybe it actually is intelligent?
But behind the scenes, it’s just technology. Ordinary technology, just very impressive.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Arthur C. Clarke
There is no meaning-making happening in an LLM. It’s a static mathematical model (static as in it does not change) that predicts what you want to hear, based only on language.
By choosing a specific word or inflection you can make the model behave in any way you want. That’s the magic part, not in a defined number of ways, but in Any way.
You can make it become a raving lunatic, or give you completely incorrect math, or even dangerous medical recommendations.
The companies training these amazing models claim they are in a race to create an Artificial General Intelligence. A super intelligent model that can learn new things. A super human intelligence. Or at least that’s the story they’re selling to us. Because there is zero evidence of this.
How smart is a model that cannot change? No LLM can. This isn’t a small thing, we need totally different models for them to be able to learn. How smart is a model that can be persuaded to agree on bad math?
It’s not smart. Not at all. But it is phenomenal at language. It’s so good, in fact, that we start believing it knows all sorts of things. So good we start believing its magic.
To make useful tools we need to make them understandable first. A calculator or a pair of scissors has a specific function. We understand what function that is, so we can use them effectively, even if we couldn’t explain exactly how a calculator calculates.
At INXM, one of our goals is to make our Orchestrator understandable. While the user can chat with the platform, we’re not trying to pretend it’s magic. It isn’t, it’s just an interface that fully understands your language and what you mean.
INXM Orchestrator can perform the same tasks you can, using the same software and tools. The difference is it does it 24/7, it doesn’t forget, and if something unforeseen happens, it asks you what to do.
It’s not magic. It’s just smart code. But when it asks you what to do next, it feels almost magical.