> I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data.
Their training data contains much more knowledge than any single human has ever had, though. If they had equivalent linguistic, understanding and reasoning abilities to a human, but with so much stored knowledge, and considering that they also win in processing speed and never get tired, that would already make them much "smarter" than humans.
Not to mention that LLMs are just the current state of the art. We don't know if there will be another breakthrough which will counter the limitation you are mentioning. We do know that AI breakthroughs are relatively common lately.
So much of this is going to hinge on what "smarter" means. My local library has heaps more knowledge than most individual people, but it'd be weird to call it "smarter" than a person.
And automation is generally cheaper and faster than human labor, but that's not a very compelling definition of "smarter" either.
But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge or validate their own outputs. We'll need a pretty significant breakthrough for that to change, and breakthroughs are pretty unpredictable.
>But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge
my bar for tech singularity is an AI that can clean a toilet.
GPT's language model is already sophisticated enough to "understand" this instruction. It's missing spatial understanding and a way to interact with the real world, but I'd be honestly very surprised if there isn't a GPT or equivalent already hooked up to cameras/motors/actuators in a lab somewhere.
within our lifetimes we'll be reading papers with titles like: "does my roomba have feelings?"
Their training data contains much more knowledge than any single human has ever had, though. If they had equivalent linguistic, understanding and reasoning abilities to a human, but with so much stored knowledge, and considering that they also win in processing speed and never get tired, that would already make them much "smarter" than humans.
Not to mention that LLMs are just the current state of the art. We don't know if there will be another breakthrough which will counter the limitation you are mentioning. We do know that AI breakthroughs are relatively common lately.