4 ms·

Also, it gives the impression that these things are "bugs", which are "fixable"...as opposed to a fundamental part of the technology itself. The more I use the

by timr 3y ago

Also, it gives the impression that these things are "bugs", which are "fixable"...as opposed to a fundamental part of the technology itself. The more I use these things, the more I feel like they're I/O modalities, more like GUIs than like search engines or databases.

tessellated 3y ago
That's exactly how I like to see LLMs. They are NLUIs, Natural Language User Interfaces.
DonHopkins 3y ago
LLMs can be useful when used as a glorified version of printf and scanf. I agree that classifying their mistakes as "hallucinations" is marketing masterstroke, but then again, marketing masterstrokes are hallucinations too. In fact all human perception is merely glorified hallucination. Your brain is cleaning up the fuzzy upside-down noise your eyes are delivering to it, so much that that you can actually hallucinate "words" with meaning on the screen that you see, or that a flower or a person or a painting is "beautiful". We have an extremely long way to go until LLM hallucinations are better than human hallucinations, and it's disingenuous to treat LLM hallucinations as a bug that can be fixed, instead of a fundamental core feature that's going to take a long time to improve to the human level, and then also admit that humans have a long way to go in evolutionary scales before our own perception isn't as hallucinatory and inaccurate as it is now. It was only extremely recently in evolutionary scales that we invented science as a way to do that, and despite its problems and limitations and corruptions and detractors, it's worked out so well that it enabled us to invent LLMs, so at least we're moving in the right direction. At least it's easier and faster for LLMs to evolve than humans, so they have a much better chance of hallucinating less a lot sooner than humans.

4 ms·

Also, it gives the impression that these things are "bugs", which are "fixable"...as opposed to a fundamental part of the technology itself. The more I use the

by timr 3y ago

tessellated 3y ago
That's exactly how I like to see LLMs. They are NLUIs, Natural Language User Interfaces.
DonHopkins 3y ago
LLMs can be useful when used as a glorified version of printf and scanf. I agree that classifying their mistakes as "hallucinations" is marketing masterstroke, but then again, marketing masterstrokes are hallucinations too. In fact all human perception is merely glorified hallucination. Your brain is cleaning up the fuzzy upside-down noise your eyes are delivering to it, so much that that you can actually hallucinate "words" with meaning on the screen that you see, or that a flower or a person or a painting is "beautiful". We have an extremely long way to go until LLM hallucinations are better than human hallucinations, and it's disingenuous to treat LLM hallucinations as a bug that can be fixed, instead of a fundamental core feature that's going to take a long time to improve to the human level, and then also admit that humans have a long way to go in evolutionary scales before our own perception isn't as hallucinatory and inaccurate as it is now. It was only extremely recently in evolutionary scales that we invented science as a way to do that, and despite its problems and limitations and corruptions and detractors, it's worked out so well that it enabled us to invent LLMs, so at least we're moving in the right direction. At least it's easier and faster for LLMs to evolve than humans, so they have a much better chance of hallucinating less a lot sooner than humans.