Sara Lily

Training the big version of the new Llama 2 model had about the same carbon emissions as 63 passenger cars emit in a year. This isn't a judgment, I just think it's interesting.

I frankly am baffled by the allure, for so many unquestionably insightful people (including many friends of mine), of letting opaque computational systems perform intellectual tasks for them. Of course it makes sense to let a computer do obviously mechanical tasks, such as computations, but when it comes to using language in a sensitive manner and talking about real-life situations where the distinction between truth and falsity and between genuineness and fakeness is absolutely crucial, to me it makes no sense whatsoever to let the artificial voice of a chatbot, chatting randomly away at dazzling speed, replace the far slower but authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.

I’ve met Doug a bunch of times and to me he gets a lot of this right. This is very much in his wheelhouse. But what I don’t get is his fear, or what seemed like a concession, that LLMs or generative models have “understanding” beyond behavioral, in the same sense he’s spent his life articulating.