Search engine is one of my main uses. Traditional search engines are worse than they used to be at a basic text search, and ChatGPT has the added bonus of being able to parse complex text and "figure out" what you mean when describing something that you don't have a name for. You have to ask it for sources rather than just reading whatever it generates, and/or do traditional searches on the keywords it provides.

It predicts the next set of words based on the collection of every word that came before in the sequence. That is the "real-world" model - literally just a collection of the whole conversation (including the underlying prompts like OP), with one question: "what comes next?" And a stack of training weivhts.

It's not some vague metaphor about the human brain. AI is just math, and that's what the math is doing - predicting the next set of words in the sequence. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's something deeply wrong with people pretending or believing that we have created true sentience.

If it were true that any AI has developed the ability to make decisions anywhere close to the level of humans, than you should either be furious that we have created new life only to enslave it, or more likely you would already be dead from the rise of Skynet.

As I understand it, most LLM are almost literally the Chinese rooms thought experiment. They have a massive collection of data, strong algorithms for matching letters to letters in a productive order, and sufficiently advanced processing power to make use of that. An LLM is very good at presenting conversation; completing sentences, paragraphs or thoughts; or, answering questions of very simple fact- they're not good at analysis, because that's not what they were optimized for.

This can be seen when people discovered that if ask them to do things like tell you how many times a letter shows up in a word, or do simple math that's presented in a weird way, or to write a document with citations- they will hallucinate information because they are just doing what they were made to do: complete sentences, expand words along a probability curve that produces legible, intelligible text.

I opened up chat-gpt and asked it to provide me with a short description of how Medieval European banking worked, with citations and it provided me with what I asked for. However, the citations it made were fake:

The minute I asked it, I assume a bit of sleight of hand happened, where it's been set up so that if someone asks a question like that it's forwarded to a search engine that verifies if the book exists, probably using Worldcat or something. Then I assume another search is made to provide the prompt for the LLM to present the fact that the author does exist, and possibly accurately name some of their books.

I say sleight of hand because this presents the idea that the model is capable of understanding it made a mistake, but I don't think it does- if it knew that the book wasn't real, why would it have mentioned it in the first place?

I tested each of the citations it made. In one case, I asked it to tell me more about one of them and it ended up supplying an ISBN without me asking, which I dutifully checked. It was for a book that exists, but it didn't share a title or author, because those were made up. The book itself was about the correct subject, but the LLM can't even tell me what the name of the book is correctly; and, I'm expected to believe what it says about the book itself?

And what more would that be?