Marcelo Magnasco

“Yes, I think we should take those words seriously,” former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper says after Trump suggested using the U.S. military against the “enemy from within.”

Scott Aaronson says the idea that while we have concepts that are totally inconceivable to a sea snail there should likewise be concepts that are equally inconceivable to us, may not be true as there may be a ceiling on computational universality

It's a bit sad and confusing that LLMs ("Large Language Models") have little to do with language; It's just historical. They are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams. A better name would be Autoregressive Transformers or something. They don't care if the tokens happen to represent little text chunks. It could just as well be little image patches, audio chunks, action choices, molecules, or whatever. If you can reduce your problem to that of modeling token streams (for any arbitrary vocabulary of some set of discrete tokens), you can "throw an LLM at it". Actually, as the LLM stack becomes more and more mature, we may see a convergence of a large number of problems into this modeling paradigm. That is, the problem is fixed at that of "next token prediction" with an LLM, it's just the usage/meaning of the tokens that changes per domain. If that is the case, it's also possible that deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch and friends) are way too general for what most problems want to look like over time. What's up with thousands of ops and layers that you can reconfigure arbitrarily if 80% of problems just want to use an LLM? I don't think this is true but I think it's half true.