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Have you ever talked to real average people? I would say an LLM is more intelligent than at least some people I know. And in the domain of programming, most pe

Have you ever talked to real average people? I would say an LLM is more intelligent than at least some people I know. And in the domain of programming, most people I know. Simply by the fact that most people don't know programming.

dartos 3y ago
Programmers aren’t any better than someone who doesn’t know how to program. Programming skill isn’t a measure of intelligence. Go outside. Talk to real people. Touch some grass.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  I have a friend called Nick, but we call him Nikipedia, since he has a crazy amount of facts stored into his brain. When we go to quizzes, our group is most likely to win. I can tell you this: LLM's know more than Nick and would beat these quizzes every single time. You can use any definition of "intelligence" that makes you happy, no problem.
samus 3y ago
LLMs are idiot savants that can do a few things very well and fail horribly at others. And they require careful prodding to correctly process tricky logical questions, exposing what they are at the core: text expanders and parroters. Highly useful of course to save typing effort and to aggregate insights over large context lengths. If anything, dealing with LLMs has helped me appreciate the capabilities of people more.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  > exposing what they are at the core: text expanders and parroters. They're much more than that. You can ask an LLM a question that it has never seen before, and it will give you a logical, reasonable answer. That requires knowledge of the world and the ability to reason. LLMs aren't the same as humans, but neither are dogs or cats, and they're obviously intelligent in their own ways.
  - samus 3y ago
    They will give that answer because they are forced to give it. The softmax amplifies whatever marginal outputs of the model head to a probability distribution. This means that if they don't have an answer, they are quite likely to "hallucinate" it. This is of course influenced by the patterns they learned. And directing them to be more structured also utilitizes pattern of structured thinking that is either part of finetuning or somewhere to be found in training data. The cat/dog vs. human analogy is a very bad comparison since their brains work fundamentally like human brains, while transformers are something completely different.
    - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
      > This is of course influenced by the patterns they learned. So is your brain. So is mine. > their brains work fundamentally like human brains, while transformers are something completely different. I brought up the dog/cat analogy because those animals, while intelligent, are unbelievably dumb in some ways that are difficult for humans to comprehend. When people say that LLMs can't reason, they typically bring up certain tasks where the LLM falls on its face. I could bring up cases in which my dog fails in some task in a way that is completely incomprehensible to me. He's intelligent, but he has some puzzling blind spots. Transformers mechanically work very differently from the human brain, but they also share a lot in common. They are a neural system that learns an internal representation of the world, and which is able to use that representation to reason about novel situations and give rational answers.
    - koonsolo 3y ago
      Ever talked to a sales person? They also start making up things when they don't know. You can't seem to accept that a computer can be intelligent. Can an ant be intelligent? Can an ant brain produced in a lab be intelligent? Can a computer simulated ant brain be intelligent? Can can LLM that is way smarter than an ant be intelligent?
      - samus 3y ago
        Nobody in their right mind expects truth from sales person. You deal with them to negotiate about price, not to inform yourself about a topic. Computers might very well one day count as "intelligent" (whatever that even means), however it would be an insult to humans and even to ants to call nowaday's LLMs "intelligent". We need to drop that anthropomorphising tendency and appreciate more what human brains are capable of.

dartos 3y ago

Programmers aren’t any better than someone who doesn’t know how to program. Programming skill isn’t a measure of intelligence. Go outside. Talk to real people. Touch some grass.

koonsolo 3y ago
I have a friend called Nick, but we call him Nikipedia, since he has a crazy amount of facts stored into his brain. When we go to quizzes, our group is most likely to win. I can tell you this: LLM's know more than Nick and would beat these quizzes every single time. You can use any definition of "intelligence" that makes you happy, no problem.

samus 3y ago

LLMs are idiot savants that can do a few things very well and fail horribly at others. And they require careful prodding to correctly process tricky logical questions, exposing what they are at the core: text expanders and parroters. Highly useful of course to save typing effort and to aggregate insights over large context lengths. If anything, dealing with LLMs has helped me appreciate the capabilities of people more.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
> exposing what they are at the core: text expanders and parroters. They're much more than that. You can ask an LLM a question that it has never seen before, and it will give you a logical, reasonable answer. That requires knowledge of the world and the ability to reason. LLMs aren't the same as humans, but neither are dogs or cats, and they're obviously intelligent in their own ways.
- samus 3y ago
  They will give that answer because they are forced to give it. The softmax amplifies whatever marginal outputs of the model head to a probability distribution. This means that if they don't have an answer, they are quite likely to "hallucinate" it. This is of course influenced by the patterns they learned. And directing them to be more structured also utilitizes pattern of structured thinking that is either part of finetuning or somewhere to be found in training data. The cat/dog vs. human analogy is a very bad comparison since their brains work fundamentally like human brains, while transformers are something completely different.
  - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
    > This is of course influenced by the patterns they learned. So is your brain. So is mine. > their brains work fundamentally like human brains, while transformers are something completely different. I brought up the dog/cat analogy because those animals, while intelligent, are unbelievably dumb in some ways that are difficult for humans to comprehend. When people say that LLMs can't reason, they typically bring up certain tasks where the LLM falls on its face. I could bring up cases in which my dog fails in some task in a way that is completely incomprehensible to me. He's intelligent, but he has some puzzling blind spots. Transformers mechanically work very differently from the human brain, but they also share a lot in common. They are a neural system that learns an internal representation of the world, and which is able to use that representation to reason about novel situations and give rational answers.
  - koonsolo 3y ago
    Ever talked to a sales person? They also start making up things when they don't know. You can't seem to accept that a computer can be intelligent. Can an ant be intelligent? Can an ant brain produced in a lab be intelligent? Can a computer simulated ant brain be intelligent? Can can LLM that is way smarter than an ant be intelligent?
    - samus 3y ago
      Nobody in their right mind expects truth from sales person. You deal with them to negotiate about price, not to inform yourself about a topic. Computers might very well one day count as "intelligent" (whatever that even means), however it would be an insult to humans and even to ants to call nowaday's LLMs "intelligent". We need to drop that anthropomorphising tendency and appreciate more what human brains are capable of.