It can be a token predictor and still tell me exactly how my life will proceed from now until the indefinite future, or be the most intelligent conversational entity you have ever witnessed.
The issue is of course with using the word "dumb": they are next token predictors, no doubt about it, but whether LLms as a class of system are smart or dumb is entirely unknown and entirely variable in time.
To interact with them effectively you must know how they behave, just like you have to know how humans behave to interact with them effectively. If you disagree, find someone with autism and have a conversation with them.
The "dumb" part comes from how it behaves in contexts where it lacks a lot of data, or where the data is skewed. Since they are tuned to give a prediction anyway and just make something up since sometimes those made up things are useful they will produce dumb results.
So people call them dumb since like dumb people they make strong statements about things they don't understand. And it doesn't matter how much smart things you encode them with, they will keep making strong statements about things they don't understand until they are fundamentally changed.
But since LLM are very smart about things where they have extensive data they can still be used to reliable solve many problems and probably in the future where we understand that better almost completely replace most lawyer and doctors work etc, because a lot of what a frontline doctor or basis lawyer work is very repetitive and can be encoded with billions of examples and decision paths into an expert system framework the LLM will follow.
So people say LLM are dumb since LLM will always keep making dumb statements. This is the same way we call Elon Musk dumb for making a lot of dumb statements, he is a smart guy but he makes dumb statements so her is dumb.
> they will keep making strong statements about things they don't understand until they are fundamentally changed
If ever there was a human quality.
Also, your explanation of "dumb" is really favoring the anti-llm side, and its a very generous interpretation. I suspect what is much more likely meant, is that token predictors cannot be smart, not now nor in the future after improvements, because they are token predictors and predicting tokens is not how intelligence works.
All of this is of course unfounded, and hidden behind the word "dumb".
> I suspect what is much more likely meant, is that token predictors cannot be smart, not now nor in the future after improvements, because they are token predictors and predicting tokens is not how intelligence works.
Why do you think that? LLM are used as expert systems today, in order to quickly navigate problems by breaking them down and iterating between different well known possible solutions and paths to check etc. That is how they work, they do that by using their next token predictions, and for things they aren't well trained on they will produce dumb results.
LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here, but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans. So its important to remind people these are just token predictors and lack many things humans do.
> If ever there was a human quality.
Humans can avoid doing that by using introspection, LLM can't. That some humans do it by not using introspection doesn't mean humans are incapable of it, we know humans are capable of it, which is why we can point out when the LLM is wrong with certainty, humans as a group make extremely good predictions.