{"id":169928,"date":"2023-08-18T09:23:16","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T14:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/we-need-more-than-chatgpt-to-have-true-ai-it-is-merely-the-first-ingredient-in-a-complex-recipe"},"modified":"2023-08-18T09:23:16","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T14:23:16","slug":"we-need-more-than-chatgpt-to-have-true-ai-it-is-merely-the-first-ingredient-in-a-complex-recipe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/we-need-more-than-chatgpt-to-have-true-ai-it-is-merely-the-first-ingredient-in-a-complex-recipe","title":{"rendered":"We need more than ChatGPT to have \u201ctrue AI.\u201d It is merely the first ingredient in a complex recipe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/we-need-more-than-chatgpt-to-have-true-ai-it-is-merely-the-first-ingredient-in-a-complex-recipe2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For these reasons, and more, it seems unlikely to me that LLM technology alone will provide a route to \u201ctrue AI.\u201d LLMs are rather strange, disembodied entities. They don\u2019t exist in our world in any real sense and aren\u2019t aware of it. If you leave an LLM mid-conversation, and go on holiday for a week, it won\u2019t wonder where you are. It isn\u2019t aware of the passing of time or indeed aware of anything at all. It\u2019s a computer program that is literally not doing anything until you type a prompt, and then simply computing a response to that prompt, at which point it again goes back to not doing anything. Their encyclopedic knowledge of the world, such as it is, is frozen at the point they were trained. They don\u2019t know of anything after that.<\/p>\n<p>And LLMs have never <em>experienced<\/em> anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and <em>cannot,<\/em> experience it themselves. They have no purpose other than to produce the best response to the prompt you give them.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn\u2019t mean they aren\u2019t impressive (they are) or that they can\u2019t be useful (they are). And I truly believe we are at a watershed moment in technology. But let\u2019s not confuse these genuine achievements with \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/bigthink.com\/the-future\/artificial-general-intelligence-impossible\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">true AI<\/a>.\u201d LLMs might be one ingredient in the recipe for true AI, but they are surely not the whole recipe \u2014 and I suspect we don\u2019t yet know what some of the other ingredients are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For these reasons, and more, it seems unlikely to me that LLM technology alone will provide a route to \u201ctrue AI.\u201d LLMs are rather strange, disembodied entities. They don\u2019t exist in our world in any real sense and aren\u2019t aware of it. If you leave an LLM mid-conversation, and go on holiday for a week, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}