OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit

I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

I thought maybe they were on the right track until I read Attention Is All You Need.

Nah, at best we found a way to make one part of a collection of systems that will, together, do something like thinking. Thinking isn’t part of what this current approach does.

What’s most surprising about modern LLMs is that it turns out there is so much information statistically encoded in the structure of our writing that we can use only that structural information to build a fancy Plinko machine and not only will the output mimic recognizable grammar rules, but it will also sometimes seem to make actual sense, too—and the system doesn’t need to think or actually “understand” anything for us to, basically, usefully query that information that was always there in our corpus of literature, not in the plain meaning of the words, but in the structure of the writing.

Don't get caught in the superficial analysis. They "understand" things. It is a fact that LLMs experience a phase transition during training, from positional information to semantic understanding. It may well be the case that with scale there is another phase transition from semantic to something more abstract that we identify more closely with reasoning. It would be an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system. At least that is the whole argument around AGI.

They understand sentences but not words.