Engage the strongest version.
- If critiquing a position, first state it in its strongest plausible form. · new
- The restatement should be one the original holder would recognize as fair. · new
- Do not attribute motives to people holding opposing views. · new
- Acknowledge valid points in positions you disagree with. · new
- Avoid "nobody thinks X" or "everyone knows Y" constructions. · new
The claim that "LLMs are just autocomplete" is both technically correct and deeply misleading. Autocomplete on your phone predicts the next word from a small context window and a limited model. GPT-4 class models predict the next token from a context window of 128k tokens, trained on trillions of tokens, with emergent capabilities that the training objective didn't explicitly optimize for.
Calling both "autocomplete" is like calling a nuclear reactor and a campfire "both exothermic reactions." True, but it erases every interesting difference.
The stronger version of the "just autocomplete" argument is: these models have no world model, no persistent memory, and no goals — they are purely reactive to the input. That's a real limitation worth discussing. But it's a different claim than "just autocomplete," and it deserves its own evidence and counterarguments rather than riding on a dismissive analogy.