Fifteen years ago I worked with a guy who, in retrospect, was very similar to an LLM. He was extremely verbally gifted and a vacuum cleaner for information. He could speak brilliantly about any topic he had been exposed to. He was a great person to send to a meeting, because he was great at answering questions coherently with the information he had on hand, and he always managed to make your ideas sound smarter than you could yourself. Based on that, you might think he sounds like a gifted human, until I tell you about his major weakness: if you asked him about something he didn't know about, he would often speak just as surely, fluently, and compellingly about it. He hallucinated just like an LLM, and that's why he was stuck in roles without a high level of responsibility despite his verbal gifts.
He was neither arrogant nor self-conscious. He treated his hallucinations as if they were the kinds of simple mistakes other people made, like, oops, I thought I understood this but I don't, no different from oops, I forgot my umbrella.
I sometimes wondered if he had a specific condition that made him the way he was, but I never doubted that he was human, with "general intelligence."
If you’ve spent any time around little kids, you’ve certainly seen that making shit up is a natural inclination of the human brain.
Ideally, as one’s intellect matures, one learns to stop doing that, and build coherent reasoning, only speak up when you know what you’re talking about.
Well, ideally. Many people never get to that stage.
He was neither arrogant nor self-conscious. He treated his hallucinations as if they were the kinds of simple mistakes other people made, like, oops, I thought I understood this but I don't, no different from oops, I forgot my umbrella.
I sometimes wondered if he had a specific condition that made him the way he was, but I never doubted that he was human, with "general intelligence."