• Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    1 year ago

    And everyone in tech who has worked on ML before collectively says “yeah that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you”. Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are a huge leap, but god did it show how greedy corporations are, just immediately jumping to “how quick can we lay people off?”. The tech is not to that spec. Yet. It will get there, but goddamn do we need to be demanding some regulations now

    • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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      1 year ago

      I was mostly posting this because the last time LLMs came up, people kept on going on and on about how much their thoughts are like ours and how they know so much information. But as this article makes clear, they have no thoughts and know no information.

      In many ways they are simply a mathematical party trick; formulas trained on so much language, they can produce language themselves. But there is no “there” there.

      • lily33@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        have no thoughts

        True

        know no information

        False. There’s plenty of information stored in the models, and plenty of papers that delve into how it’s stored, or how to extract or modify it.

        I guess you can nitpick over the work “know”, and what it means, but as someone else pointed out, we don’t actually know what that means in humans anyway. But LLMs do use the information stored in context, they don’t simply regurgitate it verbatim. For example (from this article):

        If you ask an LLM what’s near the Eiffel Tower, it’ll list location in Paris. If you edit its stored information to think the Eiffel Tower is in Rome, it’ll actually start suggesting you sights in Rome instead.

        • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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          1 year ago

          They only use words in context, which is their problem. It doesn’t know what the words mean or what the context means; it’s glorified autocomplete.

          I guess it depends on what you mean by “information.” Since all of the words it uses are meaningless to it (it doesn’t understand anything of what it either is asked or says), I would say it has no information and knows nothing. At least, nothing more than a calculator knows when it returns 7 + 8 = 15. It doesn’t know what those numbers mean or what it represents; it’s simply returning the result of a computation.

          So too LLMs responding to language.

          • lily33@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Why is that a problem?

            For example, I’ve used it to learn the basics of Galois theory, and it worked pretty well.

            • The information is stored in the model, do it can tell me the basics
            • The interactive nature of taking to LLM actually helped me learn better than just reading.
            • And I know enough general math so I can tell the rare occasions (and they indeed were rare) when it makes things up.
            • Asking it questions can be better than searching Google, because Google needs exact keywords to find the answer, and the LLM can be more flexible (of course, neither will answer if the answer isn’t in the index/training data).

            So what if it doesn’t understand Galois theory - it could teach it to me well enough. Frankly if it did actually understand it, I’d be worried about slavery.

            • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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              1 year ago

              Basically the problem is point 3.

              You obviously know some of what it’s telling you is inaccurate already. There is the possibility it’s all bullshit. Granted a lot of it probably isn’t, but it will tell you the bullshit with the exact same level of confidence as actual facts… because it doesn’t know Galois theory and it isn’t teaching it to you, it’s simply stringing sentences together in response to your queries.

              If a human were doing this we would rightly proclaim the human a bad teacher that didn’t know their subject, and that you should go somewhere else to get your knowledge. That same critique should apply to the LLM as well.

              That said it definitely can be a useful tool. I just would never fully trust knowledge I gained from an LLM. All of it needs to be reviewed for correctness by a human.

              • lily33@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                That same critique should apply to the LLM as well.

                No, it shouldn’t. Instead, you should compare it to the alternatives you have on hand.

                The fact is,

                • Using LLM was a better experience for me then reading a textbook.
                • And it was also a better experience for me then watching recorded video lectures.

                So, if I have to learn something, I have enough background to spot hallucinations, and I don’t have a teacher (having graduated college, that’s always true), I would consider using it, because it’s better then the alternatives.

                I just would never fully trust knowledge I gained from an LLM

                There are plenty of cases where you shouldn’t fully trust knowledge you gained from a human, too.

                And there are, actually, cases where you can trust the knowledge gained from an LLM. Not because it sounds confident, but because you know how it behaves.

                • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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                  1 year ago

                  Obviously you should do what you think is right, so I mean, I’m not telling you you’re living wrong. Do what you want.

                  The reason to not trust a human is different from the reasons not to trust an LLM. An LLM is not revealing to you knowledge it understands. Or even knowledge it doesn’t understand. It’s literally completing sentences based on word likelihood. It doesn’t understand any of what it’s saying, and none of it is rooted in any knowledge of the subject of any kind.

                  I find that concerning in terms of learning from it. But if it worked for you, then go for it.

      • sincle354@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Sadly we don’t even know what “knowing” is, considering human memory changes every time it is accessed. We might just need language and language only. Right now they’re testing if generating verbalized trains of thought helps (it might?). The question might change to: Does the sum total of human language have enough consistency to produce behavior we might call consciousness? Can we brute force the Chinese room with enough data?

      • pbjamm@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        They are the perfect embodiment of the internet.

        They know everything, but understand nothing

    • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been unemployed for 7 months. Every online job I see that’s been posted for at least 6 hours has over 200 applications. I’m a senior Dev with 30 years experience, and I can’t find work.

      I’d say generative AI is an existential threat as bad as offshoring was for steel in the early 80s. I’m now left with the prospect of spending the last 20 years of my work life at or near minimum wage.

      After all, I can’t afford to spend $250,000 on a new bachelor’s degree, and a community college degree might get me to $25/hr, and still costs thousands. This is causing impoverishment on a massive scale.

      Ignore this threat at your peril.

      • seang96@spgrn.com
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        1 year ago

        Your issue sounds more like a capitalism issue. FANG companies lay off thousands of employees to cut costs and prepare for changes in the economy. AI didn’t make them lay off all those employees, just corporate greed. Until AI can gather requirements, accurately produce code with at least 80%, can compile the software itself, it isn’t a threat.

        Edit fix autocorrect

          • seang96@spgrn.com
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            1 year ago

            I agree though I was following the 80/20 rule. if the softwares essentially free and does 80% of your business needs businesses would be happy. Either way AI is nowhere near that since it requires someone with the knowledge currently to get it anywhere close to a complete project.

        • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          I understand how it works. The fact remains that companies already laid off people because of AI, and until now, I have never been unemployed more than 2 months.

          I’ve also never seen a market in which most job posting garner 200 to 500 applications within 24 hours. It is armageddon out here.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        1 year ago

        I’m a senior dev too, and at first I thought the same, but really it’s a market downturn. Companies are just afraid to hire right now. I’d look into generative AI, try to understand how it works. That’s how I’ve been spending my time, and yeah, it’s intuitive the way they do it but the more you understand how it works the more you realize that it’s not ready to take our jobs. Yet. Again maybe someday, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get something semi up and running, and the models that Google uses are not going to be usable for every company. (Take a look at all the specialized models already).

        Our job never goes away, but it does constantly evolve. This is just another point where we have to learn new skills, and that may be that we all need to be model tuners some day. At the end of the day the user still needs to correctly describe what they want to have happen on the screen, and there are currently no ways to take what they describe into a full piece of software.

    • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      And everyone in tech who has worked on ML before collectively says “yeah that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you”.

      Everybody in tech would even have a passing understanding of the technology was collectively saying that. We understand the limits of technology and can feel out the bounds easily. But, too many of these dumbasses with dollar signs in their eyes are all “to the moon!”, and tripping and failing on implementing the tech in unreasonable ways.

      It was never a factoid machine, like some people wanted to believe. It was always about creatively writing something, and only one with so much attention.

      • interolivary@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        It was never a factoid machine

        Funny tidbit about the word “factoid”: its original meaning was “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”, but the modern usage is “a brief or trivial item of news or information”.

        This means that the modern usage of “factoid” is in itself a factoid, and that in the old sense LLMs sort of are factoid machines.

        Note that I’m not saying the modern use is wrong. Languages evolve, and words taking on new meanings doesn’t mean the new meanings are “wrong” (and surprisingly words changing to mean the opposite of what they used to mean isn’t all that uncommon either.)

  • bpalmerau@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    “has a model of how words relate to each other, but does not have a model of the objects to which the words refer.

    It engages in predictive logic, but cannot perform syllogistic logic - reasoning to a logical conclusion from a set of propositions that are assumed to be true”

    Is this true of all current LLMs?

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      does not have a model of the objects to which the words refer

      I’m not even sure what this is supposed to be saying. Sounds kind of like a bullshit generator.

      Words are encodings of knowledge and their expression and use represent that knowledge, and these machines ingest a repository containing a significant percent of written human communication. It encodes that the words “dog” and “bark” are often used together, but it also encodes that “dog” and “cat” are things that are both “mammals” and “mammals” are “animals”, and that the pair of them are much more likely to appear in a human household than a “porpoise”. What is this other kind of model of objects that hasn’t been in some way represented in all of the internet?

      • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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        1 year ago

        It is not a model of objects. It’s a model of words. It doesn’t know what those words themselves mean or what they refer to; it doesn’t know how they relate together, except that some words are more likely to follow other words. (It doesn’t even know what an object is!)

        When we say “cat,” we think of a cat. If we then talk about a cat, it’s because we love cats, or hate them, or want to communicate something about them.

        When an LLM says “cat,” it has done so because a tokenization process selected it from a chain of word weights.

        That’s the difference. It doesn’t think or reason or feel at all, and that does actually matter.

        • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          This is just the same hand-waving repeated. What does it mean to “know what a word means”? How is a word, indexed into a complex network of word embeddings, meaningfully different as a token from this desired “object model”? Because the indexing and encoding very much does relate words together separately from their likelihood to appear in a sentence together. These embeddings may be learned from language, but language is simply a method of communicating meaning, and notably humans also learn meaning through consuming it.

          What do things like “love” or “want” or “feeling” have to do with a model of objects? How would you even recognize a system that does that and why would it be any more capable than a LLM at producing good and trustable information? Does feeling love for a concept help you explain what a random blogger does? Do you need to want something to produce meaningful output?

          This just all seems like poorly defined techno-spiritualism.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            What does it mean to “know what a word means”?

            For one, ChatGPT has no idea what a cat or dog looks like. It has no understanding of their differences in character of movement. Lacking that kind of non-verbal understanding, when analysing art that’s actually in its domain, that is, poetry, it couldn’t even begin to make sense of the question “has this poem feline or canine qualities” – best it can do is recognise that there’s neither cats nor dogs in it and, being stumped, make up some utter nonsense. Maybe it has heard of catty and that dogs are loyal and will be looking for those themes, but feline and canine as in elegance? Forget it, unless it has read a large corpus of poet analysis that uses those terms: It can parrot that pattern matching, but it can’t do the pattern matching itself, it cannot transfer knowledge from one domain to another when it has no access to one of those domains.

            And that’s the tip of the iceberg. As humans we’re not really capable of purely symbolic thought so it’s practically impossible to appreciate just how limited those systems are because they’re not embodied.

            (And, yes, Stable Diffusion has some understanding of feline vs. canine as in elegance – but it’s an utter moron in other areas. It can’t even count to one).


            Then, that all said, and even more fundamentally, ChatGPT (as all other current AI algos we have) is a T2 system, not a T3 system. It comes with rules how to learn, it doesn’t come with rules enabling it to learn how to learn. As such it never thinks – it cannot think, as in “mull over”. It reacts with what passes as a gut in AI land, and never with “oh I’m not sure about this so let me mull it over”. It is in principle capable of not being sure but that doesn’t mean it can rectify the situation.

            • lloram239@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              it couldn’t even begin to make sense of the question “has this poem feline or canine qualities”

              Which is obviously false, as a quick try will show. Poems are just language and LLMs understand that very well. That LLMs don’t have any idea how cats actually look like or move, beyond what they can gather from text books, is irrelevant here, they aren’t tasked with painting a picture (which the upcoming multi-modal models can do anyway).

              Now there can of course be problems that can be expressed in language, but not solve in the realm of language. But I find those to be incredible rare, rare enough that I never really seen a good example. ChatGPT captures an enormous amount of knowledge about the world, and humans have written about a lot of stuff. Coming up with questions that would be trivial to answer for any human, but impossible for ChatGPT is quite tricky.

              And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

              Have you actually ever actually seen an iceberg or just read about them?

              It comes with rules how to learn, it doesn’t come with rules enabling it to learn how to learn

              ChatGPT doesn’t learn. It’s a completely static model that doesn’t change. All the learning happened in a separate step back when it was created, it doesn’t happen when you interact with it. That illusion comes from the text prompt, which includes both your text as well as its output, getting feed into the model as input. But outside that text prompt, it’s just static.

              “oh I’m not sure about this so let me mull it over”.

              That’s because it fundamentally can’t mull it over. It’s a feed forward neural network, meaning everything that goes in on one side comes out on the other in a fixed amount of time. It can’t do loops by itself. It has no hidden internal monologue. The only dynamic part is the prompt, which is also why its ability to problem solve improves quite a bit when you require it to do the steps individually instead of just presenting the answer, as that allows the prompt to be it’s “internal monologue”.

              • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Coming up with questions that would be trivial to answer for any human, but impossible for ChatGPT is quite tricky.

                Which is why I came up with the “feline poetry” example. It’s a quite simple concept for a human even if not particularly poetry-inclined, yet, if noone ever has written about the concept it’s going to be an uphill battle for ChatGPT. And, no, I haven’t tried. I also didn’t mean it as some kind of dick measuring contest I simply wanted to explain what kind of thing ChatGPT really has trouble with.

                Have you actually ever actually seen an iceberg or just read about them?

                As a matter of fact yes, I have. North cape, Norway.

                ChatGPT doesn’t learn. It’s a completely static model that doesn’t change.

                ChatGPT is also its training procedure if you ask me, same as humanity is also its evolution.

          • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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            1 year ago

            It is not hand-waving; it is the difference between an LLM, which, again, has no cognizance, no agency, and no thought – and humans, which do. Do you truly believe humans are simply mechanistic processes that when you ask them a question, a cascade of mathematics occurs and they spit out an output? People actually have an internal reality. For example, they could refuse to answer your question! Can an LLM do even something that simple?

            I find it absolutely mystifying you claim you’ve studied this when you so confidently analogize humans and LLMs when they truly are nothing alike.

            • lloram239@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              People actually have an internal reality.

              So do LLMs.

              Can an LLM do even something that simple?

              Ask it about any NSFW topic and it will refuse.

              analogize humans and LLMs when they truly are nothing alike.

              They seem way more similar than different. The part were they are different trivially follow from the LLMs architecture (e.g. LLMs are static, tokenizing makes character-based problems difficult, memory is limited to the prompt, no interaction with the external world, no vision, no hearing, …) and most of that can be overcome by extending the model, e.g. multi-model models with vision and hearing are on their way, DeepMind is working on models that interact with the real world, etc. This is all coming and coming fast.

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Do you truly believe humans are simply mechanistic processes that when you ask them a question, a cascade of mathematics occurs and they spit out an output? People actually have an internal reality.

              Those two things can be true at the same time.

              I find it absolutely mystifying you claim you’ve studied this when you so confidently analogize humans and LLMs when they truly are nothing alike.

              “Nothing alike” is kinda harsh, we do have about as much in common with ChatGPT as we have with flies purpose-bred to fly left or right when exposed to certain stimuli.

              • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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                1 year ago

                Those two things can be true at the same time.

                No, they can’t. The question is fundamentally: do humans have any internal thoughts or feelings, or are they algorithms? If you believe other people aren’t literally NPCs, then they are not LLMs.

                • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  That doesn’t even begin to be a dichotomy. Unless you want to claim humans are more than Turing complete (hint: that’s not just physically but logically impossible) we can be expressed as algorithms. Including that fancy-pants feature of having an internal world, and moreso being aware of having that world (a thermostat also has an internal world but it’s a) rather limited and b) the thermostat doesn’t have a system to regulate its internal world, the outside world does that for it).

            • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              no cognizance, no agency, and no thought

              Define your terms. And explain why any of them matter for producing valid and “intelligent” responses to questions.

              Do you truly believe humans are simply mechanistic processes that when you ask them a question, a cascade of mathematics occurs and they spit out an output?

              Why are you so confident they aren’t? Do you believe in a soul or some other ephemeral entity that wouldn’t leave us as a biological machine?

              People actually have an internal reality. For example, they could refuse to answer your question! Can an LLM do even something that simple?

              Define your terms. And again, why is that a requirement for intelligence? Most of the things we do each day don’t involve conscious internal planning and reasoning. We simply act and if asked will generate justifications and reasoning after the fact.

              It’s not that I’m claiming LLMs = humans, I’m saying you’re throwing out all these fuzzy concepts as if they’re essential features lacking in LLMs to explain their failures in some question answering as something other than just a data problem. Many people want to believe in human intellectual specialness, and more recently people are scared of losing their jobs to AI, so there’s always a kneejerk reaction to redefine intelligence whenever an animal or machine is discovered to have surpassed the previous threshold. Your thresholds are facets of the mind that you both don’t define, have no means to recognize (I assume your consciousness, but I cannot test it), and have not explained why they’re important for fact rather than BS generation.

              How the brain works and what’s important for various capabilities is not a well understood subject, and many of these seemingly essential features are not really testable or comparable between people and sometimes just don’t exist in people, either due to brain damage or a simple quirk in their development. The people with these conditions (and a host of other psychological anomalies) seem to function just fine and would not be considered unthinking. They can certainly answer (and get wrong) questions.

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      This is what I find the most amusing about the criticism of LLMs and many other AI systems aswell. People often talk about them as if they’re somehow uniquely flawed, while in reality what they’re doing isn’t that different from what humans do aswell. The biggest difference is that when a human hallucinates it’s often obvious but when chatGPT does that it’s harder to spot.

  • lloram239@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Today’s Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines

    Apparently so are today’s bloggers and journalists. Since they just keep repeating the same nonsense and seem to lack any sense of understanding. I am really starting to question if humans are capable of original thought.

    The responses all came with citations and links to sources for the fact claims. And the responses themselve all sound entirely reasonable. They are also entirely made up.

    This does not compute. Bing Chat provides sources, as in links you can click on and that work. It doesn’t pull things out of thin air, it pulls information out of Bing search and summarizes it. That information is often wrong, incomplete and misleading, as it will only take a tiny number of websites to source that information. But so would most humans using Bing search. So not really a problem with the bot itself.

    ChatGPT gives most of the time far better answers, as it bases the answers on knowledge gained from all the sources, not just specific ones. But that also means it can’t provide sources and if you pressure it to give you some, it will make them up. And depending on the topic, it might also not know something for which Bing can find a relevant website.

    LLMs are trained not to produce answers that meet some kind of factual threshold, but rather to produce answers that sound reasonable.

    And guess what answer sounds the most reasonable? A correct one. People seriously seem to have a hard time to grasp how freakishly difficult it is to generate plausible language and how much stuff has to be going on behind the scene to make that possible. That does not mean GPT will be correct all the time or be an all knowing oracle, but you’ll have to be rather stupid to expect that to begin with. It’s simple the first chatbot that actually kind of works a lot of the time. And yes, it can reason and understand within its limits, it making mistakes from time to time does not refute that, especially when badly prompted (e.g. asking it to solve a problem step by step can dramatically improve the answers).

    LLMs are not people, but neither are they BS generators. In plenty of areas they already outperform humans and in others not so much. But you are not learning that from articles that treat every little mistake from an LLM like some huge gotcha moment.

    • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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      1 year ago

      No one is saying there’s problems with the bots (though I don’t understand why you’re being so defensive of them – they have no feelings so describing their limitations doesn’t hurt them).

      The problem is what humans expect from LLMs and how humans use them. Their purposes is to string words together in pretty ways. Sometimes those ways are also correct. Being aware of what they’re designed to do, and their limitations, seems important for using them properly.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        they have no feelings so describing their limitations

        These kinds of articles, which all repeat exactly the same extremely basic points and make lots of fallacious ones, are absolute dogshit at describing the shortcomings of AI. Many of them don’t even bother actually testing the AI themselves, but just repeat what they heard elsewhere. Even with this one I am not sure what exactly they did, as Bing Chat works completely different for me from what is reported here. It won’t hurt the AI, but it certainly hurts me reading the same old minimum effort content over and over and over again, and they are the ones accusing AI of generating bullshit.

        The problem is what humans expect from LLMs and how humans use them.

        Yes, humans are stupid. They saw some bad sci-fi and now they expect AI to be capable of literal magic.

    • FIash Mob #5678@beehaw.org
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      These AI systems do make up bullshit often enough that there’s even a term for it: Hallucination.

      Kind of a euphemistic term, like how religious people made up the word ‘faith’ to cover for the more honest term: gullible.

  • Blapoo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    They’re glorified autocompletes. Way too much attention is being given to LLMs in isolation. By themselves: Not a silver bullet.

    But when called in a chain . . . eyebrows

    • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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      People think they are actually intelligent and perform reasoning. This article discusses how and why that is not true.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        People think they are actually intelligent and perform reasoning.

        They do both. The articles fails to successfully argue that point and just turns AIs failure to answer an irrelevant trivia question into a gotcha moment.

        • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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          1 year ago

          I would encourage you to ask ChatGPT itself if it is intelligent or performs reasoning.

          • lloram239@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            ChatGPT: I can perform certain types of reasoning and exhibit intelligent behavior to some extent, but it’s important to clarify the limitations of my capabilities. […] In summary, while I can perform certain forms of reasoning and exhibit intelligent behavior within the constraints of my training data, I do not possess general intelligence or the ability to think independently and creatively. My responses are based on patterns in the data I was trained on, and I cannot provide novel insights or adapt to new, unanticipated situations.

            That said, this is one area where I wouldn’t trust the ChatGPT one bit. It has no introspection (outside of the prompt), due to not having any long term memory. So everything it says is based on whatever marketing material OpenAI trained it with.

            Either way, any reasonable conversation with the bot will show that it can reason and is intelligent. The fact that it gets stuff wrong sometimes is absolutely irrelevant, since every human does that too.

            • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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              1 year ago

              I think it’s hilarious you aren’t listening to anyone telling you you’re wrong, even the bot itself. Must be nice to be so confident.

              • lloram239@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                You got to provide actual arguments, examples, failure cases, etc. Instead all I see is repetition of the same tired talking points from 9 months ago when the thing launched. It’s boring and makes me seriously doubt if humans are capable of original thought.

      • BitOneZero@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I think their creators have deliberately disconnected the runtime AI model from re-reading their own training material because it’s a copyright and licensing nightmare.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      They can replace the bullshit jobs of which we have many, serving the essential purpose of keeping the people doing them fed and thus the economy and society stable. 🥲

    • 30p87@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      It can replace nothing. It can make the job of eg. developers easier. And on a small, private scale ML can replace writers and stock photo libraries, if they have support for pictures. However, on a larger scale, both would have massive problems of quality, diversity and copyright. You can’t use the output of a ML algorithm for things you earn anything with if there are active cases exploring if the copyright belongs to the ML itself, the producers of the training data, who probably didn’t give anyone consent, no one, or actually you.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        You can’t use the output of a ML algorithm for things you earn anything

        Better tell Adobe, as they are loading their Photoshop full of AI stuff.

        If you type “paint me an elephant”, yeah, you might not get copyright on that, but nobody would buy your elephant picture anyway. So that’s hardly an issue. The moment you actually produce something complex with the help of AI, there will be so many steps involved that you’ll get copyright on it no problem.

        And once the AI gets smart enough to produce complex things by itself, without a human hand holding it along the way, you’ll have bigger problems to worry about anyway. Since at that point the AI isn’t just replacing the artist, it’s replacing the whole media production chain. No more need to wait for Hollywood to make a movie, you can just tell your AI what you want to see and it will produce one on demand, customized specifically for you. What we see today is basically the beginnings of the Holodeck, endless on-demand entertainment customized for the user.

  • Gamey@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I don’t understand shit like that, they are tools, not totally accurate ones but unless you use Bing they do produce a lot of good stuff if used correctly…

  • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    They’re both BS machines and fact generators. It produced bullshit when asked about him because as far as I can tell he’s kind of a nobody, not because it’s just a stylistic generator. If he asked about a more prominent person likely to exist more significantly within the training corpus, it would likely be largely accurate. The hallucination problem stems from the system needing to produce a result regardless of whether it has a well trained semantic model for the question.

    LLMs encode both the style of language and semantic relationships. For “who is Einstein”, both paths are well developed and the result is a reasonable response. For “who is Ryan McGreal”, the semantic relationships are weak or non-existent, but the stylistic path is undeterred, leading to the confidently plausible bullshit.

    • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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      1 year ago

      They don’t generate facts, as the article says. They choose the next most likely word. Everything is confidently plausible bullshit. That some of it is also true is just luck.

      • Kogasa@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        It’s obviously not “just” luck. We know LLMs learn a variety of semantic models of varying degrees of correctness. It’s just that no individual (inner) model is really that great, and most of them are bad. LLMs aren’t reliable or predictable (enough) to constitute a human-trustable source of information, but they’re not pure gibberish generators.

        • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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          1 year ago

          No, it’s true, “luck” might be overstating it. There’s a good chance most of what it says is as accurate as the corpus it was trained on. That doesn’t personally make me very confident, but ymmv.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        That’s just not true. Semantic encodings work. It’s not like neural networks are some new untested concept, the LLMs have some new tricks under the hood and are way more extensive in their training goal, but they’re fundamentally the same thing. All neural networks are mimicry machines enabled and limited by their data, but mimicking largely correct data produces largely correct results when the answer, or interpolatable answers exists in the training data. The problem arises when asked to go further and further afield from their inputs. Some interpolation and substitutions work, but it gets increasingly unreliable the more niche the answer is.

        While the LLM hype has very seriously oversold their abilities, the instinctive backlash to say they’re useless is similarly way off-base.

        • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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          1 year ago

          No one is saying “they’re useless.” But they are indeed bullshit machines, for the reasons the author (and you yourself) acknowledged. Their purposes is to choose likely words. That likely and correct are frequently the same shouldn’t blind us to the fact that correctness is a coincidence.

          • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            That likely and correct are frequently the same shouldn’t blind us to the fact that correctness is a coincidence.

            That’s an absurd statement. Do you have any experience with machine learning?

              • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                Yes, it’s been my career for the last two decades and before that was the focus of my education. The idea that “correctness is a coincidence” is absurd and either fails to understand how training works or rejects the entire premise of large data revealing functional relationships in the underlying processes.

                • Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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                  1 year ago

                  Or you’ve simply misunderstood what I’ve said despite your two decades of experience and education.

                  If you train a model on a bad dataset, will it give you correct data?

                  If you ask a question a model it doesn’t have enough data to be confident about an answer, will it still confidently give you a correct answer?

                  And, more importantly, is it trained to offer CORRECT data, or is it trained to return words regardless of whether or not that data is correct?

                  I mean, it’s like you haven’t even thought about this.

  • BitOneZero@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I think public-facing they have to be that way, otherwise they would copyright infringe on their training material. Behind the scenes, I suspect that the wealthy can gain access to AI engines where the random response isn’t set so high and they can even fact-check and cite their own training material better. It’s really hard to imagine that they can debug these things without having any idea what training material influenced which pattern of associations. I sure don’t buy that they don’t have tools to trace back to training material.

    Right now consumer-facing AI wants to put in simple prompts and get back unique term papers each time you ask it the same question.