3 ms·

And if the data that LLMs have trained on is only simple social conversation, what level of intelligence will that begat? No nobel-laureate-level 'thinking' is

And if the data that LLMs have trained on is only simple social conversation, what level of intelligence will that begat? No nobel-laureate-level 'thinking' is going to arise from training text composed of obvious or trivial statements -- which surely compose 99% of ChatGPT's training material. These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. If we want higher level cognition from future LLMs, where will such deep thought come from? Surely not the training data used now: email, tweets, reddit, mass media, etc. GIGO indeed. Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading.

xp84 3y ago
It does seem like limiting new training material to only good quality information would be prudent rather than slurping up entire GPT-produced spam sites. Sure, LLMs will have been used to refine and assist much of it from here on out, but I'd like to think theses, newspapers, etc won't just be produced entirely by unsupervised robots and not even fact-checked. If that's the case we'll have bigger problems.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Well, I’d say that given LLM have no agency, if a Nobel laureate uses LLMs to produce their text with their direct guidance of the concepts to convey and details. I think LLM aren’t just useful as oracles but as calculators for writing. To that end I don’t find math done using matlab is any less useful than artisanal hand made math. Likewise text constrained and informed by a human mind with novel information but presented by a LLM- is it inferior?
JohnFen 3y ago
> These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. I don't think it's any more rare now than it ever was. It's always been rare. > Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading. Sturgeon's Law is immutable and timeless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

xp84 3y ago

It does seem like limiting new training material to only good quality information would be prudent rather than slurping up entire GPT-produced spam sites. Sure, LLMs will have been used to refine and assist much of it from here on out, but I'd like to think theses, newspapers, etc won't just be produced entirely by unsupervised robots and not even fact-checked. If that's the case we'll have bigger problems.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Well, I’d say that given LLM have no agency, if a Nobel laureate uses LLMs to produce their text with their direct guidance of the concepts to convey and details. I think LLM aren’t just useful as oracles but as calculators for writing. To that end I don’t find math done using matlab is any less useful than artisanal hand made math. Likewise text constrained and informed by a human mind with novel information but presented by a LLM- is it inferior?

JohnFen 3y ago

> These days, it's a rare piece of text that surprises the reader with creative or ingenious or outside-the-box thinking. I don't think it's any more rare now than it ever was. It's always been rare. > Much has been written, yes. But not much of that is worth reading. Sturgeon's Law is immutable and timeless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law