New study says AI poses no existential threat to humanity

As LLMs have grown exponentially more powerful in recent years, the possibility of them acquiring ‘emergent’ capabilities such as reasoning or planning has been an ongoing concern. Indeed, the largely ‘black box’ way in which LLMs operate has fed into this idea, with even those working on AI often unable to explain some of the capabilities that LLMs such as ChatGPT have been able to display. 

However, the new study claims to have put these fears to ease, demonstrating that there is no reasoning taking place within LLMs. According to the research, what sometimes appears to us as reasoning is in fact simply in-context learning (ICL), where LLMs can ‘learn’ new information based on a set of examples provided to them. Over the course of thousands of experiments, the research team showed that the ability to follow instructions (ICL) - combined with memory and linguistic proficiency - accounts for both the capabilities and limitations exhibited by today’s LLMs.