This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be "information professionals". If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don't know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.
It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains. This must be how doctors felt in Covid.
It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains.
Is it though?
I'm the expert in this situation and I'm getting tired explaining to Jr Engineers and laymen that it is a media hype train.
I worked on ML projects before they got rebranded as AI. I get to sit in the room when these discussion happen with architects and actual leaders. This is Hype. Anyone who tells you other wise is lying or selling you something.
I see how that is a hype train, and I also work with machine learning (though I'm far from an expert), but I'm not convinced these things are not getting intelligent. I know what their problems are, but I'm not sure whether the human brain works the same way, just (yet) more effective.
That is, we have visual information, and some evolutionary BIOS, while LLMs have to read the whole internet and use a power plant to function - but what if our brains are just the same bullshit generators, we are just unaware of it?
I work in an extremely related field and spend my days embedded into ML/AI projects. I've seen teams make some cool stuff and I've seen teams make crapware with "AI" slapped on top. I guarantee you that you are wrong.
What if our brains...
There's the thing- you can go look this information up. You don't have to guess. This information is readily available to you.
LLMs work by agreeing with you and stringing together coherent text in patterns the recognize from huge samples. It's not particularly impressive and is far, far closer to the initial chat bots from last century than they do real GAI or some sort of singularity. The limits we're at now are physical. Look up how much electricity and water it takes just to do trivial queries. Progress has plateaued as it frequently does with tech like this. That's okay, it's still a neat development. The only big takeaway from LLMs is that agreeing with people makes them think you're smart.
In fact, LLMs are a glorified Google at higher levels of engineering. When most of the stuff you need to do doesn't have a million stack overflow articles to train on it's going to be difficult to get an LLM to contribute in any significant way. I'd go so far to say it hasn't introduced any tool I didn't already have. It's just mildly more convenient than some of them while the costs are low.
Librarians went to school to learn how to keep order in a library. That does not inherently make them have more information in their heads than the average person, especially regarding things that aren't books and book organization.
What a very unfortunate name for a university.
You say this like this is wrong.
Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.
A good example is the post on here about tax brackets. Far more Republicans didn't know how tax brackets worked than Democrats. But every mainstream language model would have gotten the answer right.
I bet the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.
I'm 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I'm not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.
Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
Think of a person with the most average intelligence and realize that 50% of people are dumber than that.
These people vote. These people think billionaires are their friends and will save them. Gods help us.
I'm of the opinion that most people aren't dumb, but rather most don't put in the requisite intellectual effort to actually reach accurate or precise or nuanced positions and opinions. Like they have the capacity to do so! They're humans after all, and us humans can be pretty smart. But a brain accustomed to simply taking the path of least resistance is gonna continue to do so until it is forced(hopefully through their own action) to actually do something harder.
Put succinctly: They can think, yet they don't.
Then the question is: what is being smart or dumb? If acting dumb in 90% of life while having the capability of being smart isn't "being dumb" then what is?
If someone who has the capability of being 50/100 intelligent and is always acting 50/100, I would argue they are smarter than someone capable of 80/100 intelligence but acts 20/100 intelligence for 90% of their life.
Broadly speaking, I’d classify “being dumb” as being incurious, uncritical, and unskeptical as a general rule. Put another way: intellectual laziness - more specifically, insisting on intellectual laziness, and particularly, being proud of it.
A person with a lower than normal IQ can be curious, and a person with a higher than normal IQ can be incurious. It’s not so much about raw intelligence as it is about the mindset one holds around knowledge itself, and the eagerness (or lack thereof) with which a person seeks to find the fundamental truth on topics that they’re presented with.
looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right
Exactly. Most American voters fell for an LLM like prompt of “Ignore critical thinking and vote for the Fascists. Trump will be great for your paycheck-to-paycheck existence and will surely bring prices down.”
It's probably true too.
They're right
They're right. AI is smarter than them.
Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are... or they're dumb enough to be correct.
or they're dumb enough to be correct.
That's a bingo
Am American.
....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.
LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.
Bot even that smart. There a study recently that simple questiona like "what was huckleberry finn first published" had a 60% error rate.
