> Have you used it outside of the training set? And have you actually used it for generalized tasks? Let's be kind to the LLM and define generalized to mean "do anything if it can be hammered into a textual interface." It fails at pretty much everything that's not on the internet.
I've used it, yes, and I've seen it fail and hallucinate on me; but that does not invalidate its capabilities in my eyes. The thing is, you CAN talk with it, and it CAN extract meaning from your words and provide useful responses, unlike anything we had before.
To me, the risk in this whole enterprise is that AI is inherently "better" than humans in several ways, and that these differences might be completely game-changing:
Namely it's much easier to scale up (power/size/interconnect bandwidth) compared to a research group or somesuch, and its also cheaper, faster, has better availability and is functionally immortal.
These advantages make it very likely to me that it WILL be replacing human white collar workers shortly-- simply because that's economical.
And the more interfaces you give it to physical reality (which it'll need to do its jobs), the higher the risk.
Speculating on if/when/how it will show awareness or self-interest is pure guesswork, but it's almost indefensible to call that likelihood zero.
Regarding promp injection:
I'm highly confident that this will not be a long-term obstacle, even though I'm uncertain that it can be solved; there's two reasons why:
1) If SQL injection had been an "unfixable" problem, and everyone had known about it from the start, do you believe that this would have prevented the rollout of internet-connected databases? Because I don't think so, and my view on hallucinations is analogous (but I believe that problem might be more tractable).
2) Literally every person is vulnerable to prompt injection already; every salesman knows that it is quite feasible to coax people into acting against previous instructions and even their own interests if you are allowed to talk into them for a good while.