4 ms·

Maybe not in this specific case, but in many fields the problem is knowledge management. There are too many things to know, to remember, too many niches for sup

Maybe not in this specific case, but in many fields the problem is knowledge management. There are too many things to know, to remember, too many niches for super rare special cases, and then you need to properly put the right things together at the right time. Every now and then there is an article about scientists in some field rediscover a principle or technique that was known over a hundred years ago already but didn't have any practical applications so was forgotten again, but could then solve some problem we were having today for the past two decades. Because nobody remembered that obscure paper by some dude who didn't achieve anything remarkable during his lifetime. So we just spent 20 years reinventing the wheel. This is the kind of task I expect AI to excel at. It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive. You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output and for the bigger picture though.

p-e-w 4y ago
> You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output Did you read the story? We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. And while this is an anecdote, it is by no means an isolated incident. Human professionals are being outperformed on trivial tasks (note that this was a common complication of a common disease) by chatbots. I'm far more scared by human incompetence than by AI making mistakes.
- gwd 4y ago
  > We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. On the contrary; we need AIs to "completeness check" the experts, because experts are prone to forget things or have missing knowledge; we need humans to "sanity check" the AIs because current LLMs are insane: mixed in with brilliant pieces of insight are super-obvious mistakes and outright hallucinations.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    Many human professionals are incompetent in ways that go beyond just "missing knowledge". This dramatically understates what a colossal problem incompetence is, and one that AIs don't appear to suffer from in the same way. Already with the current generation of AIs, and their strange mistakes and so-called hallucinations, I'd be hard pressed to say that they are overall worse than human professionals, considering what I've seen from those.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  > Did you read the story? I specifically started my comment with "Maybe not in this specific case", but reading your other comments here you unfortunately seem to be mostly focused on ranting about medical professionals. Also a short reminder of the HN guidelines, especially Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Closi 4y ago
> It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive. I'm not sure I agree entirely with this - It's very rare to see 6 year olds to be capable of writing valid code, summarising academic literature, or doing diagnostics on a dogs bloodwork. Even if I gave a 6 year old access to all the information and literature, they just wouldn't really be able to do these things. Maybe if we trained the 6 year old for 10 years then they could do these things, but then they aren't 6 anymore they are 16. At age 6 the developmental milestone is really "Can count to and understand the concept of "10."
- prox 4y ago
  6yo in terms of cognitive performance, not knowledge performance I assume parent comment means. Ultimately comparing LLM or MLS against humans is not a good idea.
  - Closi 4y ago
    What do we mean by cognition, how do we measure it, and what aspect of cognitive performance are 6 year olds better at though? Because GPT4 would destroy a 6 year old at a verbal reasoning, quantative reasoning or an abstract reasoning test.
    - prox 4y ago
      Indeed. Lots of noise in communicating exactly what we mean. That is why it is futile to compare to a human. Most people don’t even know how to describe the qualities.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  True, it's not a great analogy because it doesn't apply in every regard as you point out. But I guess if you've used it you might understand what I mean... It's sometimes so hilariously wrong or self-contradicting, which reminds me of how children are always super convinced everything they picked up somewhere has to be true, or maybe did even pick up the right thing but just interpreted it wrong. I tested chatgpt a while ago by giving it some real world bugs I encountered in code in the past. It was really hit or miss, sometimes it confidently reasoned in hilariously nonsensical directions, other times it almost nailed it on first try. What's even more interesting, and what I don't see mentioned that often when people show impressive results, is that often times if you just regenerate an answer with the exact same input, you get a completely dumb and wrong reply the next time, or vice versa. So consistency is another problem.

p-e-w 4y ago

> You will still need humans for a good while to sanity check the output Did you read the story? We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. And while this is an anecdote, it is by no means an isolated incident. Human professionals are being outperformed on trivial tasks (note that this was a common complication of a common disease) by chatbots. I'm far more scared by human incompetence than by AI making mistakes.

gwd 4y ago
> We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round. On the contrary; we need AIs to "completeness check" the experts, because experts are prone to forget things or have missing knowledge; we need humans to "sanity check" the AIs because current LLMs are insane: mixed in with brilliant pieces of insight are super-obvious mistakes and outright hallucinations.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  Many human professionals are incompetent in ways that go beyond just "missing knowledge". This dramatically understates what a colossal problem incompetence is, and one that AIs don't appear to suffer from in the same way. Already with the current generation of AIs, and their strange mistakes and so-called hallucinations, I'd be hard pressed to say that they are overall worse than human professionals, considering what I've seen from those.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
> Did you read the story? I specifically started my comment with "Maybe not in this specific case", but reading your other comments here you unfortunately seem to be mostly focused on ranting about medical professionals. Also a short reminder of the HN guidelines, especially Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

Closi 4y ago

> It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive. I'm not sure I agree entirely with this - It's very rare to see 6 year olds to be capable of writing valid code, summarising academic literature, or doing diagnostics on a dogs bloodwork. Even if I gave a 6 year old access to all the information and literature, they just wouldn't really be able to do these things. Maybe if we trained the 6 year old for 10 years then they could do these things, but then they aren't 6 anymore they are 16. At age 6 the developmental milestone is really "Can count to and understand the concept of "10."

prox 4y ago
6yo in terms of cognitive performance, not knowledge performance I assume parent comment means. Ultimately comparing LLM or MLS against humans is not a good idea.
- Closi 4y ago
  What do we mean by cognition, how do we measure it, and what aspect of cognitive performance are 6 year olds better at though? Because GPT4 would destroy a 6 year old at a verbal reasoning, quantative reasoning or an abstract reasoning test.
  - prox 4y ago
    Indeed. Lots of noise in communicating exactly what we mean. That is why it is futile to compare to a human. Most people don’t even know how to describe the qualities.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
True, it's not a great analogy because it doesn't apply in every regard as you point out. But I guess if you've used it you might understand what I mean... It's sometimes so hilariously wrong or self-contradicting, which reminds me of how children are always super convinced everything they picked up somewhere has to be true, or maybe did even pick up the right thing but just interpreted it wrong. I tested chatgpt a while ago by giving it some real world bugs I encountered in code in the past. It was really hit or miss, sometimes it confidently reasoned in hilariously nonsensical directions, other times it almost nailed it on first try. What's even more interesting, and what I don't see mentioned that often when people show impressive results, is that often times if you just regenerate an answer with the exact same input, you get a completely dumb and wrong reply the next time, or vice versa. So consistency is another problem.