The Case That A.I. Is Thinking | The New Yorker
I once had a boss who said that a job interview should probe for strengths, not for the absence of weaknesses. Large language models have many weaknesses: they famously hallucinate reasonable-sounding falsehoods; they can be servile even when you’re wrong; they are fooled by simple puzzles. But I remember a time when the obvious strengths of today’s A.I. models—fluency, fluidity, an ability to “get” what someone is talking about—were considered holy grails. When you experience these strengths firsthand, you wonder: How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?