There are a lot of people who think they are making really impressive critiques of LLMs when they are doing the equivalent of saying “Dogs can’t eat chocolate because truly experiencing chocolate requires a spark of the divine, and as as we all know, dogs do not have souls. So don’t feed dogs chocolate.”

You have arrived at the correct conclusion that maximalist claims about LLMs are very wrong. But you did it with reasoning worse than the LLMs can do.

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LLMs don’t actually know English grammar, they just abstract patterns from many examples of utterances in English. You and I, of course, humans, with a conscious mind that we can see and understand via the simple expedient of naïve empiricism, we simply read that book that fully enumerates the rules of English grammar (you remember? the book?) when we were infants. QED.

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@vruba You know how long it took me to figure out "LLM" is "large language model," not "Masters of Law." Makes much more sense now

@vruba
I actually did read some books with a lot of English grammar rules. But that might have to do with the fact that I learned English as a foreign language. :-)
@tml

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This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.