Why should we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm? Because it leads to psychosis and to making hyperbolic, dangerously wrong statements like “pray they don't want to kill us.”
You are conflating creation and instruction. Your birth is analogous to the creation of an LLM model. Your subsequent actions are a consequent of your bodily compulsions, tampered by your environment. The LLMs actions are governed by what it is trained to perform. No one has full autonomy of their lives, but I would argue that LLMs have none at all.
Autonomous just means that a system is self-controlled rather than externally controlled. It is the name used for robots when they are wholly controlled by on-board software rather than external commands or remote control.
Something like NASA's Mars rovers are considered as semi-autonomous since they do receive external instructions, but then execute those instructions autonomously without further intervention. Similarly the combination of a coding agent and the LLM it connects to would best be considered as a semi-autonomous system.
You could also have a fully autonomous robot, or just agent, powered by an LLM, where it's not taking external instructions, but rather reacting to external events in some internally proscribed way.
There is value in learning how to launch a model and develop an environment with which to interact with it. This understanding is basically a pillar of a “hacker” ethos.
But if you just wanna outsource understanding for 3 bucks in tokens, that’s cool too.
It just doesn't make sense to me that Opus 5 costs the exact same as Opus 4.8, my bet is that they simply subsidize Opus 5 more comparatively so it still looks as if they are making significant progress to keep investment dollars flowing, further inflating the bubble. I might be completely wrong but I trust nothing their CEO says, he's a habitual doom troll and will say whatever makes marketing sense.
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