A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

The author seems to want to label any discourse as “anthropomorphizing”. The word “goal” stood out to me: the author wants us to assume that we're anthropomorphizing as soon as we even so much as use the word “goal”. A simple breadth-first search that evaluates all chess boards and legal moves, but stops when it finds a checkmate for white and outputs the full decision tree, has a “goal”. There is no anthropomorphizing here, it's just using the word “goal” as a technical term. A hypothetical AGI with a goal like paperclip maximization is just a logical extension of the breadth-first search algorithm. Imagining such an AGI and describing it as having a goal isn't anthropomorphizing.

Author here. I am entirely ok with using "goal" in the context of an RL algorithm. If you read my article carefully, you'll find that I object to the use of "goal" in the context of LLMs.

If you read the literature on AI safety carefully (which uses the word “goal”), you'll find they're not talking about LLMs either.