I hate the AI Industry and I love Ted Chiang https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
I've read plenty of posts, articles, pieces, flippant thoughts about how ChatGPT is some sort of "breakthrough" or that we're "finally seeing real artificial intelligence" (and I'm admit to have been starstruck by it at first glance, as davin can attest to before he metaphorically dunked me in cold water about it) and it's just put so clearly here how what we are seeing is, basically, a well-organized search engine with a few parlor tricks of compression.
there's no mind behind the words, there's just, as ted chiang puts it here, well-placed blur.
