[OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5’s improved “emotional intelligence,” which he says makes users feel like they’re “talking to a thoughtful person.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner.” Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind, said the goal is to create “models that are able to understand the world around us.” These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.
Primary source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-is-not-intelligent/ar-AA1GcZBz
Secondary source: https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780063418561
Oh dear God yes … my employer wants us to use Cursor. I’ve tried twice now. It can’t debug C# unit tests. In attempting to configure itself to do that it hosed itself so badly that I had to uninstall Cursor AND Code then wipe my system of IDE leftovers and reinstall both. Attempt 2 was to have it go through a rather large class file to make sure there were newlines in the right place, and remove excess newlines. It totally hosed the class file and I had to revert. It then apologized profusely and admitted it really shouldn’t be used to make direct changes to files.
It’s ok if you want to get a nudge in the right direction when you’re suck. But that’s about it.