You don't need to be fluent in Spanish to order coffee in a Spanish café

François Chollet, software engineer and AI researcher at Google, writes on Twitter (via Simon Willison):

People seem to be falling for two rather thoughtless extremes:

1. “LLMs are AGI, they work like the human brain, they can reason, etc.”
2. “LLMs are dumb and useless.”

Reality is that LLMs are not AGI — they’re a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful, if you want to automate a known task that’s a match for its training data distribution.

Memorization works, as long as you don’t need to adapt to novelty. You don’t *need* intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.

(LLM is Large Language Model, the most well-known gateway to which is ChatGPT; AGI is Artificial General Intelligence, the notion of a computer that can think like people can).

Outside of the realm of AI, his statement “You don’t *need* intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.” echos what I tell people who are skittish about travelling to a destination where they don’t speak the language (and where their language isn’t commonly used): you don’t need to be fluent in Spanish to order coffee in a Spanish café, you can just say “café, por favour.”

Similarly, you can point at a baguette in a Parisian bakery, and say “un, s’il vous plaît.”

You can do the same thing when you’re pointing at a flavour of ice cream.

You can accomplish a surprising amount by memorizing a few key phrases and using them in known, fixed scenarios. We once had a lovely bus ride from Venice to Ljubljana, on the Florence-to-Sofia run, with a very kind group of Bulgarian workers returning home. We shared food with them, and they with us. 

“As long as you don’t need to adapt to novelty,” which is a lot of travel (a bakery is a bakery is a bakery), everything goes fine. Doesn’t help when the bus stops in the middle of nowhere and everyone’s told to get off, or when the bakery is out of bread, or you need a membership to shop at the Italian coop grocery. Or when your Spanish waiter asks you what type of coffee you want. But, most of the time, in most places, you can get by just fine using the dataset you carry around about the basics of how the world works.