4 ms·

I think that's a bit harsh. There's been some definite progress with LLMs getting better at reasoning, picking apart instructions, producing helpful suggestions

I think that's a bit harsh. There's been some definite progress with LLMs getting better at reasoning, picking apart instructions, producing helpful suggestions, criticism, etc. What they are weak at is exactly the same stuff we're actually weak at: accurately recalling facts. Except they are able to recall vastly more stuff than any human being would be able to recall. An inhuman amount of facts actually. The core issue is that when asked sufficiently open questions, these models tend to take some liberties with the facts. But most of the knowledge tests that are used to benchmark LLMs, would be hard to pass for the vast majority of humans on this planet as well. Worse, if you follow the public debate on various political topics a bit you realize that it features a lot of people suffering from confirmation bias parroting each other. Populist politicians seem to get away with a lot of stuff that would put most LLMs to shame; seemingly without affecting their popularity. IMHO, LLMs by themselves can't be trusted to get things right but paired with some subsystems to produce references, check things, look things up, they become quite capable. Also, it helps asking the right targeted questions and constrain them a little. We pay for chat gpt at work. At 20$ per month per user, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Do we blindly trust it? Absolutely not. Do we get shit tons of value out of it? Yes. I program with it, I brainstorm with it, I let it review text, I use it to work out bullet points into a coherent narrative, I use it to refine things, I use it to generate unit tests, etc. Is it flawless? No. But it sure saves me a lot of time. And getting the same value from people tends to be a lot harder/more expensive. This dismissive "it's just a stochastic parrot" type criticism kind of misses the forest for the trees. If you've ever observed toddlers repeating stuff adults tell them, you'd realize that we all start out as stochastic parrots. Forget about getting any coherent/insightfull statement out of a toddler. And most adults aren't that much better and would fail most of the tests we throw at LLMs.

aworks 3y ago
I used to write a classical music blog. I was an enthusiastic listener but only had 1 music theory class in my life. Yet I had enough mastery of the vocabulary to get classical musicians and critics to read what I had to say. I attribute some of this to years of reading classical music reviews turning me into a stochastic parrot. I then added some value on top of that via enthusiasm, specializing in a niche (American classical music), and just cranking out frequent, reasonable and sometimes interesting content. Fanfare Magazine had a critic try using ChatGPT to write classical record reviews. But they used 3.5 and had it try to write a review of an old revered album so it "went off the rails." To write a review to the expected standards requires sophistication and breadth of knowledge. I can probably mimic like ChatGPT did but I likely wouldn't reach the (sometimes pedantic if experienced) level of a real critic. I wonder if it will ever be feasible to have AI listen to a new recording and write a review on an objective basis rather than try to synthesize a review from existing text. That to me would be the real breakthrough.
player1234 3y ago
Quantify it, anecdotal shit tons is not good enough.

aworks 3y ago

I used to write a classical music blog. I was an enthusiastic listener but only had 1 music theory class in my life. Yet I had enough mastery of the vocabulary to get classical musicians and critics to read what I had to say. I attribute some of this to years of reading classical music reviews turning me into a stochastic parrot. I then added some value on top of that via enthusiasm, specializing in a niche (American classical music), and just cranking out frequent, reasonable and sometimes interesting content. Fanfare Magazine had a critic try using ChatGPT to write classical record reviews. But they used 3.5 and had it try to write a review of an old revered album so it "went off the rails." To write a review to the expected standards requires sophistication and breadth of knowledge. I can probably mimic like ChatGPT did but I likely wouldn't reach the (sometimes pedantic if experienced) level of a real critic. I wonder if it will ever be feasible to have AI listen to a new recording and write a review on an objective basis rather than try to synthesize a review from existing text. That to me would be the real breakthrough.

player1234 3y ago

Quantify it, anecdotal shit tons is not good enough.