And yet It Understands
Guys guys! Stop talking about LLMs a minute and look at this!<p>I gave my phone&#x27;s calculator app this very hard multiplication problem and it got it right! Look!<p>2398794857945873 * 10298509348503 = 2.47040112696963e+28<p>My calculator can do arithmetic! But only humans can do arithmetic! Therefore, my calculator must understand arithmetic!<p>And I bet it always gets it right, too! That means it must understand arithmetic better than LLMs understand language, because LLMs make mistakes, but my calculator never does! Right? That makes so much sense: the rate of error of a machine tells us something important about its ability to understand, not about the design of the machine! A perfect machine <i>u n d e r s t a n  d s</i>!!!!<p>This is amaxing! Philip K. Dick was right all along! AGI is real! It is in my pocket, right now and it is going to take all our jobs and turns us all into paperclips if we forget not to ask it to calculate all the decimal digits of pi!<p>We live in interesting times. I wish Galileo was here, you&#x27;d see what he would have to say about all this. Automated machines that do arithmetic? Mind blowing!<p>(Cue the &quot;but that&#x27;s not the same as language modelling because ...&quot; some convoluted equivalent to &quot;I&#x27;m used to calculators but it&#x27;s the first time I see a language model&quot;)