Now that AI agents are part of our lives, it's very important that we learn more about them. Of course, Reddit isn't the most official or valid source of information, but reading multiple takes on a subject completes the picture of an otherwise very new and still largely misunderstood matter.
This worker who creates Language Learning Models for a living has something to tell us, and we're here to listen. I believe the truth resides somewhere in the middle. Between the aggressive marketing AI companies bombard us with and what tech journalists or employees like this say to us.
It's very easy to personify an agent that's responding to us in perfect English, and attribute a thought process or even a personality. The truth is, it's not really thinking; it's only a highly codified machine that 'knows' which words are better to follow others in certain contexts. It's been trained for that. It's more like a mathematical thing, with a lot of variables, but mathematical nonetheless.
Notice how I had to use the word 'knows' when describing it. Part of the problem is that culturally we don't have words [yet] to describe non-human language-operating 'machines', so we end up involuntarily personifying artificial intelligence and contributing to the general confusion.
If you had an AI boyfriend, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
The good thing is that there is a lot of information [like the post underneath] out there to begin to understand how these models work, so we can finally start to use them as tools to our advantage and make our lives easier.
In the end, that's what they were originally created for, right?