>> Am I the only one who's completely exhausted with these blog posts and twitter threads that just throw some chat logs into the ether paired with a sloppy, bi

>> Am I the only one who's completely exhausted with these blog posts and twitter threads that just throw some chat logs into the ether paired with a sloppy, biased analysis that misses important details and obvious refutations? No no, you're not alone. It just kills me how many people seem to be so ready to abandon critical thinking and go straight for the results that confirm their beliefs. But of course, with large language models, there's so much behaviour that just poking them to see what falls off is never going to work, if one wants to understand what they do. And why do we even need to do any poking? We know how they work. Because "we" made them [1]. Have people completely lost the ability to reason about a complex system, without getting lost in the complexity? Have people lost the ability to reason about a system's behaviour from the principles of its design? When a piece of software does something unexpected, what would most programmers do? Stare at it and try to guess why it did that? Keep generating results and come up with a fancy theory? Wouldn't they just look at the damn code, debug it maybe, and try to find out why it's doing that? Has everyone simply lost the ability to draw a straight line from a system's internal structure, to its external behaviour? What the effing 'ell is wrong with people? It's like someone's gone and replaced all the engineers and the scientists with homeopaths and dowsers. I just checked the twitter bio of the guy who started the Twitter thread. He's an astronomer. Is that how astronomers study the cosmos? They just stare hard at the output of their instruments and try to imagine why it looks that way? Note: that's astro_nomer_, not astrologist. ______________ [1] Well, OpenAI has made that one, but they didn't invent the idea of modelling language by taking statistics over a corpus [2]. And they're not the first to make language models, either, not by a very, very long shot. So that's "we" as in humans, who have done some language modelling before. Hands up! No? Well, I guess you know who you are. [2] Haha no. You know who did? No, that wasn't the one. This is the one: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno... Scroll down to page 7. See the section titled "3. The series of approximations to English"? Yeah, Shannon invented statistical language modelling. Or maybe it wasn't even he, and he's just showing how to do it right. That was in 1948, btw. So much for language models being a shiny new thing that will keep improving because it's only now getting started.