Are emergent abilities of large language models a mirage?
I had someone much knowledgable on this topic than myself claim ChatGPT and the like &quot;understand&quot; stuff. My standing argument is that they wouldn&#x27;t hallucinate incorrect responses if they understood anything, the hallucination is when their approximation of what a real response would be falls short.<p>These emergent abilities are not actually that, but a result of humans&#x27; poor understanding of cognition and communication.<p>What concerns me very much is how the harms that can be caused by LLMs has been so greatly under reported.<p>I imagine being someone with the right power and access telling ChatGPT &quot;find all people that would vote against this candidate in real time and devise ad content and social media messaging and bit interaction to change their minds or discourage them from voting&quot; heck, any intel org of a major country is probably already working on this. No more whistleblowing or posting anonymously on social media, companies would even share models based on private email and conversations you had so other companies could use LLMs to identify everything you posted elsewhere and to have LLMs designate a score for hoe hireable you are. Police can crack down on crime better but also crack down on dissent or any police reforms.<p>And we aren&#x27;t even talking about war time use of LLMs or what happens when you marry something like ChatGPT with Dall-E and make it all real-time.<p>I am warning anyone who will listen. Smartphones are the most dangerous things out there. Any service or interaction that depends on them is deteimental to peace and liberty of the masses long term. People have not learned a thing from Snowden or 2016 elections.<p>And why are all the smart journalists asleep on the job on this topic. Where are the unreasonable scaremongerers when you need them!