Interesting post. I find myself moving away from the sort of "compare/contrast with humans" mode and more "let's figure out exactly what this machine _is_" way of thinking.<p>If we look back at the history of mechanical machines, we see a lot of the same kind of debates happening there that we do around AI today -- comparing them to the abilities of humans or animals, arguing that "sure, this machine can do X, but humans can do Y better..." But over time, we've generally stopped doing that as we've gotten used to mechanical machines. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone compare a wheel to leg, for instance, even though both "do" the same thing, because at this point we take wheels for granted. Wheels are much more efficient at transporting objects across a surface in some circumstances, but no one's going around saying "yeah, but they will never be able to climb stairs as well" because, well, at this point we recognize that's not an actual argument we need to have. We know what wheels do and don't.<p>These AI machine are a fairly novel type of machine, so we don't yet really understand what arguments make sense to have and which ones are unnecessary. But I like these posts that get more into exactly what an LLM _is_, as I find them helpful in understanding better exactly what kind of machine an LLM is. They're not "intelligent" any more than any other machine is (and historically, people have sometimes ascribed intelligence, even sentience, to simple mechanical machines), but that's not so important. Exactly what we'll end up doing with these machines will be very interesting.