All the cool kids are doing an LLM startup and raising huge amounts of money to do things, and I am, you know, amazed and excited about all the things that are happening there.

I’m a daily user of many of these technologies, but I do still look at this: fundamentally, LLMs can’t be the whole answer, you know? These uh, transformer-based models — it’s not the way a human brain works, and what they do, as magical as it is, is not handling so many of the fundamental things that, you know, cats and dogs do, let alone small children.

Where a lot of people don’t, you know, they imagine that these LLMs are reading all of these books, reading the whole Internet, and they don’t understand that, no, it’s taking all of human knowledge, putting it in a giant blender, and then training from there, and it’s magical: it works really well. But when you’re put into a situation where you have to learn something new, there are fundamental things that so many of the researchers here are working on that are just not understood yet. We do not have even a line of sight to an answer for these things.