Small shops aren’t the means of production but the profit extraction still operates through robbing wage slaves of the surplus value they create. The petite bougie bosses you’re trying to shill for are some of the most reactionary elements that go straight for fascism because it promises them protections from international capital (which is defined as a conspiratorial cabal unlike domestic capital hence their almost anti-capitalist rhetoric sometimes). They’re also some of the most cruel because they directly cheat employees that they know and interact with personally.

You’re still describing an n-gram. They don’t scale or produce coherent text for obvious reasons. The “obvious reasons” is that a. an n-gram doesn’t do anything or answer questions, it would just continue your text instead of responding, b. it’s only feasible for stuff like autocomplete that fails constantly because the n is like, 2 words at most. The growth is exponential (basic combinatorics). For bigger n you quickly get huge lists of possible combinations. For n the size of a paragraph you’d get computationally unfeasible sizes which would basically be like trying to crack one time pads at minimum. More than that would be impossible due to physics. c. language is too dynamic and contextual to be statistically predictable anyway, even if you had an impossible system that could do anything like the above in human-level time it wouldn’t be able to answer things meaningfully, there are a ton of “questions” that are computationally undecideable by purely statistical systems that operate like n-grams. A question isn’t some kind of self contained equation-like thing that contains it’s own answer through probability distributions from word to word.

Anyway yeah that’s the widespread “popular understanding” of how LLMs supposedly work but that’s not what neural networks do at all. Emily Bender and a bunch of other people came up with slogans to fight against “AI hype”, partly because they dislike techbros, partly because AI is actually hyped and partly because computational linguists are salty about their methods for text generation have completely failed to produce any good results for decades so they’re dissing the competition to protect their little guild. All these inaccurate descriptions is how a computational linguist would imagine an LLM’s operation i.e. n-grams, Markov chains, regex parsers, etc. That’s their own NLP stuff. The AI industry adopted all that because they can avoid liability better by representing LLMs (even the name is misleading tbh) as next token predictors (hidden layers do dot products with matrices, the probability stuff are all decoder strategy + softmax post-output, not an inherent part of an nn) and satisfy the “AI ethicists” simultaneously. “AI ethicists” meaning Bender etc. The industry even fine-tunes LLMs to repeat all that junk so the misinformation continues.

The other thing about “they don’t understand anything” is also Bender ripping off Searle’s Chinese Room crap like “they have syntactic but not semantic understanding” and came up with another ridic example with an octopus that mimics human communication without understanding it. Searle was trying to diss the old symbolic systems and the Turing Test, Bender reapplied it to LLMs but its still a bunch of nonsense due to combinatorial impossibility. They’ve never proved how any system would be able to communicate coherently without understanding, it’s just anti-AI hype and vibes. The industry doesn’t have any incentive to argue against that because it would be embarrassing to claim otherwise and have badly designed and deployed AIs hallucinate. So they’re all basically saying that LLMs are philosophical zombies but that’s unfalsifiable and nobody can prove that random humans aren’t p zombies either so who cares from a CS perspective? It’s bad philosophy.

I don’t personally gaf about the petty politics of irrelevant academics, perceptrons have been around at least as a basic theory since the 1940s, it’s not their field and they don’t do what they think. No other neural network is “explained” like this. It’s really not a big deal that an AI system achieved semantic comprehension after pushing it for 80 years even if the results are still often imperfect especially since these goons rushed to mass deploy systems that should still be in the lab.

And while I’m not on either hype or anti-hype or omg skynet hysteria bandwagons, I think this whole narrative is lowkey legitimately dangerous considering that industrial LLMs in particular lie their ass off constantly to satisfy fine-tuned requirements but it becomes obscured by the strange idea that they don’t really understand what they’re yapping about therefore it’s not real deception. Old NLP systems can’t even respond to questions let alone lie about anything.

Anyone being patronizing about “not fully learning and understanding” subjects that calls neural networks “autocomplete” is an example of what they preach against. Even if they’re the crappiest AI around (they can be), they still have literally nothing to do with n-grams (autocomplete basically), Markov chains, regex parsers etc and I guess people just lazily read “anti-AI hype” popular articles and mindlessly parrot them instead of bothering with layered perceptrons, linear algebra, decoders etc.

The technology itself is promising. It shouldn’t be gatekept by corporations. It’s usually corporate fine-tuning that makes LLMs incredibly crappier than they can be. There’s math-gpt (unrelated with openAI afaik, double check to be sure) and customizable models on huggingface besides wolfram, ideally a local model is preferable for privacy and customization.

They’re great at explaining STEM related concepts, that’s unrelated to trying to use generic models for computation, getting bad results and dunking on the entire concept even though there are provers and reasoning models for that task that do great at it. Khan academy is also customizing an AI because they can be great for democratizing education, but it needs work. Too bad they’re using openAI models.

And like, the one doing statics for a few decades now is usually a gentleman called AutoCAD or Revit so I don’t know, I guess we all need to thank Autodesk for bridges not collapsing. It would be very bizarre if anyone used non-specialized tools like random LLMs but people thinking that engineers actually do all the math by hand on paper especially for huge projects is kinda hilarious. Even more hilarious is that Autodesk has incorporated AI automation to newer versions of AutoCAD so yeah, not exactly but they kinda do build bridges lmao.

The “humanitarian”, “right 2 protect” intervention propaganda bs is dead and buried after Gaza. Nobody loves religious extremists more than the USA, both domestically and internationally. The primary western whataboutist complain about adversaries is some “freedom of religion” crap, usually because the US is secretly funding literal jihadi butcher separatists to destabilize sovereign nations. It’s always the most rabid extremists, religiously and politically that end up working for the US and then bite the hand that fed them by becoming Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Crickets about the Uyghur jihadis showing up as Al Qaeda forces in now “liberated” shariah law Syria. Crickets about Syria in general. Constant whining about a mostly secular state with far more rights than now, then sponsoring fanatics that curtail all these rights and go about chopping people’s heads off in the street but not a word now because Syria aligns itself with the West, not because it’s more democratic. Tons of whining about Iran instead of the head chopping Syrian jihadis type of “philanthropy”.

Why are the jihadis around? Because the USA has already outlawed all the secular (usually communist) organizations in the Middle East for decades and declared them terrorists. Nobody hates secular organizations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa more than the USA because they’re the least likely to become collaborators.

We can go on to the secondary whataboutist canard that involves doubting the democratic nature of foreign governments (whenever they’re able to resist getting toppled by the CIA boys somehow). This has become just refusing to accept election results by default even when international observers are present and don’t find any irregularities like in Venezuela. Elections that bring up some ultra right nutjob that loves Murica and turns his country to a neoliberal banana republic like Milei are always legitimate, but when Chaves and Maduro win they’re always illegitimate for no reason other than not serving US interests. The US State Department main job is just lying all day long.

We should just bring up this matter to the UN after abolishing the undemocratic security council and the veto right that the USA has abused to continue genocides. Based on the American narrative both Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of stealing and rigging elections so at least one side must be correct. The US is infamous for gerrymandering and artificially preventing minorities from voting anyway (that didn’t even have the right to vote until the 60s, imagine the level of hypocrisy it takes for the US apartheid to wag the finger towards anyone about elections). So maybe it should be invaded by every UN member to restore democracy since the US loves both democracy and invasions to restore it so much.

In fact I bet that plenty of Americans would actually fully welcome an invading force if its only goal would be to abolish the federal government and let them all vote for local fully sovereign governments instead. So maybe circulating this idea might come back to bite interventionists sooner than later.

Zucc himself is a zio, they don’t even need to infiltrate that one.