fabric -y "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTU8Ha4Jyfc" --stream --pattern write_essay What Language Models Can and Can't Do
In this fascinating interview, AI researcher François Chollet offers his insights on the capabilities and limitations of modern large language models (LLMs). He argues that while LLMs have achieved impressive performance on many benchmarks, this does not necessarily translate to true intelligence.
Chollet makes the key point that intelligence is fundamentally about the ability to handle novelty - to deal with situations you've never seen before and come up with suitable models on the fly. This is something current LLMs struggle with. If you ask them to solve problems that are significantly different from their training data, they will often fail.
The reason, Chollet explains, is that LLMs are essentially just very sophisticated "interpolative databases." They memorize an enormous number of functions and patterns from their training data, and when queried, they retrieve and combine t