> AI is a new kind of computer. > • A traditional computer processes structured data with deterministic instructions. > • AI processes unstructured data with natural-language nondeterministic instructions. I like the simplicity of this framing. But personally, I am more interested in unifying both these kind of computational work: Mathematical (precise & deterministic data structures and instructions) and human-media centric (language, image/audio/video etc) which approximate/ambiguous. https://jeffhuber.substack.com/p/ai-is-a-new-computer

"universal unstructured information processor that can simulate any intuitive procedure (reasoning) given sufficient resources and the proper context" the "reasoning" part is called into question somewhat here: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf "despite sophisticated self-reflection mechanisms, these models fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds. We identified three distinct reasoning regimes: standard LLMs outperform LRMs at low complexity, LRMs excel at moderate complexity, and both collapse at high complexity." at one's most cynical one might be forgiven for walking away from this short paper with the conclusion that the current state of large models is a super-expensive super-sophisticated autocomplete? too cynical??

I do believe the Apple paper is way too cynical. Look up the benchmark score on GAIA leaderboard, then take a look at the sample tasks in the dataset. I bet you will find it ridiculous to call it a "sophisticated autocomplete" then.

oh no, they've co-opted gaia!! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia)