9 ms·

"Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 perc

by jerf 2y ago

"Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all." 100% completely accurate is super-AI-complete. No human can meet that goal either. No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something. So 100% accurate can't be the goal. Obviously the goal is to get the responses to be less obviously stupid. Which, while there are cynical money-oriented business reasons for, it is obviously also a legitimate hole in the I in AI to propose putting glue on pizza to hold the cheese on. But given my prior observations that LLMs are the current reigning world-class champions at producing good sounding text that seems to slip right past all our system 1 thinking [1], it may not be a great thing to remove the obviously stupid answers. They perform a salutatory task of educating the public about the limitations and giving them memorable hooks to remember not to trust these things. Removing them and only them could be a net negative in a way. [1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system-1-and-system-2-thinking https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...

SoftTalker 2y ago
> putting glue on pizza to hold the cheese on It's actually not the dumbest idea I've heard from a real person. So no surprise it might be suggested by an AI that was trained on data from real people.
- krapp 2y ago
  It wasn't an idea, though. It was a joke someone made on Reddit. If an AI can't tell the difference, it shouldn't be responsible for posting answers as authoritative.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses
    - warkdarrior 2y ago
      It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.
      - dgellow 2y ago
        Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do
    - oldgradstudent 2y ago
      Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge. r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable. But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.
      - blablabla123 2y ago
        ...which is sometimes incredibly hard and it might not be possible because it's such a niche topic or people might be just wrong. Just thinking about Urban Myths, Conspiracy theories etc. where even without a niche factor things may sound unbelievable but actually disproving can be effort that is out of proportion
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - mvdtnz 2y ago
        I have seen a tremendous amount of bad advice on bikewrench.
        oldgradstudent 2y ago
  - dspillett 2y ago
    It may not be a joke. Perhaps it has confused making food for eating with directions for preparing food for menu photography and other advertising.
    - Fartmancer 2y ago
      The Reddit post in question was definitely a joke. This is the post in response to a user asking how to make their cheese not slide off the slice: > To get the cheese to stick I recommend mixing about 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. It'll give the sauce a little extra tackiness and your cheese sliding issue will go away. It'll also add a little unique flavor. I like Elmer's school glue, but any glue will work as long as it's non-toxic. This matches the AI's response of suggesting 1/8 a cup of glue for additional "tackiness."
benrutter 2y ago
> So 100% accurate can't be the goal. Obviously the goal is to get the responses to be less obviously stupid. I'm not sure I agree. I think you're right that 100% accuracy is potentially unfeasable as a realistic aim, but I think the question is how accurate something needs to be in order to be a useful proposition for search. AI that's as knowledgable as I am is a good achievement and helpful for a lot of use cases, but if I'm searching "What's the capital of Mongilia" someone with averageish knowledge taking a punt with "Maybe Mongoliana City?" is not helpful at all- if I can't trust AI responses to a high degree, I'd much rather just have normal search results showing me other resources I can trust. Google's bar for justifying adding AI to their search proposition isn't "be better than asking someone on the street", it's "be better than searching google without any AI results"
- smashed 2y ago
  The problem is that in all the shared examples, Google ai search does not respond with a Maybe xyz, question mark? like you did. It always answers with high confidence and can't seem to navigate any gray area where there are multiple differing opinions or opposing source of truths.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Yeah the "manipulating language cogently is intelligence" premise that underlines this "AI" cycle is proving itself wrong in a grand way.
- jerf 2y ago
  I should have been more clear. I am referring to Google's goals. Humanity as an abstract concept or you personally may have other goals, but, well, perhaps I am a cynic, but I think Google's goals are rather more monetary and less idealistic than they would represent. They don't want or need (as other replies correctly point out) the AI to always be correct and accurate. Along with general cynicism with regard to any conceivable AI's ability to do that, it is also fair to point out that the web itself doesn't have that ability either. We can't even find an objective yardstick to measure an AI with that way. Google's goal is to make the bad press go away so people use the AI more so that in the indefinite but ideally near future this AI can be monetized somehow to justify the interstellar valuations being ascribed to this technology in the "if it isn't happening in two fiscal quarters or less it might as well not exist" US/Western financial markets.
bugglebeetle 2y ago
Yes, which is why the ability to sift accurate and authoritative sources from spam, propaganda, and intentionally deceptive garbage, like advertising, and present those high-quality results to the user for review and consideration, is more important than any attempt to have an AI serve a single right answer. Google, unfortunately, abandoned this problem some time ago and is now left to serve up nonsense from the melange of low-quality noise they incentivized in pursuit of profits. If they had, instead, remained focused on the former problem, it’s actually conceivable to have an LLM work more successfully from this base of knowledge.
jsemrau 2y ago
This is statistics though. Edge cases are nothing new and risk management concepts have evolved around fat tails and anomalies for decades. Therefore the statement is as naive as writing a trading agent that is 100% correct. In my opinion, this error shows lack of understanding responsible scaling architectures. If this would be their first screw up I wouldn't mind, but Google just showed us a group of diverse Nazis. If there is a need for consumer protection for online services, it is exactly stuff like this. ISO 42001 lays out in great detail that AI systems need to be tested before they are rolled out to the public. The lack of understanding of AI risk management is apparent.
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
lukev 2y ago
I feel like there's some semantic slippage around the meaning of the word "accuracy" here. I grant you, my print Encyclopedia Britannica is not 100% accurate. But the difference between it and a LLM is not just a matter of degree: there's a "chain of custody" to information that just isn't there with a LLM. Philosophers have a working definition of knowledge as being (at least†) "justified true belief." Even if a LLM is right most of the time and yields "true belief", it's not justified belief and therefore cannot yield knowledge at all. Knowledge is Google's raison d'etre and they have no business using it unless they can solve or work around this problem. † Yes, I know about the Gettier problem, but is not relevant to the point I'm making here.
- jononor 2y ago
  Encyclopedia Britannica is also wrong in a reproducible and fixable way. And the input queries a finite set. It's output does not change due to random or arbitrary things. It is actually possible to verify. LLMs so far seem to be entirely unverifiable.
  - lukev 2y ago
    They don’t just seem it. They are by design. We talk about models “hallucinating” but that’s us bringing an external value judgement after the fact. The actual process of token generation works precisely the same. It’d be more accurate to say that models always hallucinate.
    - madeofpalk 2y ago
      Yes - this is what i've been saying all the time. The term 'hallucinations' is misleading because the whole point of LLMs is that they recombine all their inputs into something 'new'. They only ever hallucinate outputs - that's their whole point!
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        Into something probable. The models that underlie these chatbots are usually overfitted, so while they usually don't repeat their training data verbatim, they can.
saagarjha 2y ago
Thankfully a billion people are not asking me for answers to things, so it's OK if I am wrong sometimes.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Nor am I being treated as an omniscient magic black box of knowledge. Hilariously though, polyvinyl acetate, the main ingredient in Elemers glue is used as a binding agent to keep emulsions from separating into oil and water, and is used in chewing gum, and covers citrus fruits, sweets, chocolate, and apples in a glossy finish, among other food things.
notnullorvoid 2y ago
100% accuracy should be the goal, but the way to achieve that isn't going to from teaching an AI to construct a definitive sounding answer to 100% of questions. Teaching AI how to respond with "I don't know", and give confidence scores is the path to nearing 100% accuracy.
Szpadel 2y ago
I think the biggest difference with human (and the most important one) is that human can tell you "I have no idea, this isn't my field" or "I'm just guessing here" but LLMs will confidently say to super stupid statement. AI doesn't know what it knows. if you only score where human provide answer, then human score would be probably in high 90s
- pankajkumar229 2y ago
  I find irony here.
- antifa 2y ago
  > human can tell you "I have no idea, this isn't my field" or "I'm just guessing here" I wish more of them would lol
wredue 2y ago
If I could delivery “80% correct” software for my workplace, my day would be a whole hell of a lot easier.
Swizec 2y ago
> No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something. Kahneman has a fantastic book on this called Noise. It’s all about noise in human decision making and how to counteract it. My favorite example was how even the same expert evaluating the same fingerprints on different occasions (long enough to forget) will find different results.
praisewhitey 2y ago
You're looking at it the wrong way, the goal should be 0% inaccurate. Meaning for the 20% of things it can't answer, it shouldn't make something up.
- ruszki 2y ago
  Nothing can be sure that it hasn’t inaccurate or incomplete knowledge. So that can’t be a goal either.
skybrian 2y ago
Or to put it another way, I think Google should have a way of saying "yes, we know this result is wrong, but we're leaving it in because it's funny." There is a demand for funny results. Someone asking “how many rocks should I eat” is looking for entertainment, so you might as well give it to them.
- leptons 2y ago
  The right answer is no rocks. Some mentally ill person could type that in and get "eat 1000 rocks" and then die from eating rocks, and that would be Google's fault. It's not funny. I have no doubt right now there are at least 50 youtube videos being made testing different glue's effectiveness holding cheese on a pizza. And some of those idiots are going to taste-test it, too. And then people will try it at home, some stupid kids will get sick - I have no doubt. It was a bit premature to label LLMs as "Intelligence", it's a cool parlor trick based on a shitload of power consumption and 3D graphics cards, but it's not intelligent and it probably shouldn't be telling real (stupid) humans answers that it can't verify are correct.
  - nomel 2y ago
    Google is not responsible, and should never be responsible, for protecting mentally ill people from themselves. It would be at a severe detriment to the rest of us if they took on that responsibility. Society should set the bar to “a reasonable person”, otherwise you’re doomed, with no possible alternative to a nanny state.
    - leptons 2y ago
      It's not only mentally ill people that are at risk, but anyone that doesn't know it's not a good idea to put "non-toxic" glue in pizza cheese. That includes a lot of not-mentally-ill but just plain dumb people. Google didn't need to tell people that glue+pizza is a reasonable thing to do, or even just a thing. It sure did frame it like it was a legitimate response. And Google didn't even have to reply with this or anything else, they could have just supplied the links to other sites where it had been suggested, but no - they have to make a show of force with their premature foray into AI, and have it tell real people all kinds of false, and possibly dangerous things. That's an unforced error by Google that they could end up being prosecuted for.
tomrod 2y ago
If everyone can be wrong, then might the assertion that all are wrong committing this same fallacy? "Can" is not destiny, perhaps you have met people who are fully right about the basics but you just didn't sufficiently grok their correctness.
willis936 2y ago
Failing loudly is an excellent feature. "More compelling lies" is not the answer.
hatenberg 2y ago
So google decides shipping 80% distilled crap is good enough. Yay
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> You are wrong about some basic things too Sure, but probably not "add glue to pizza to get the cheese to stick" wrong...
- dspillett 2y ago
  At least it suggested non-toxic glue… That suggests some context about recipes needing to be safe is somehow present in its model.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    Most likely this has nothing to do with "recipes being safe" being in the model It seems the glue thing comes from a reddit shitpost from some time ago. There's a screenshot going around on twitter about it[0](11 years in the screenshot but no idea when it was taken) It specifically mentions "any glue will work as long as it is non-toxic" so best guess is that's why google output that [0]https://x.com/kurtopsahl/status/1793494822436917295?t=aBfEzD8ifYfbcTjuZdTktQ&s=19 https://x.com/kurtopsahl/status/1793494822436917295?t=aBfEzD...
    - Fartmancer 2y ago
      It is indeed from 11 years ago. Here's a direct link to the Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...
- fragmede 2y ago
  The thing about that is that polyvinyl acetate is that's what's in elemers glue and is also used in chewing gum, and chocolate and to make the surface of Apples more shiny, so you're probably eating glue, we just don't like to call it that. emulsifier is a better description.
verisimi 2y ago
100% correct, 80% correct lol. The thing is that truth/reality is not a thing that is resolvable. Not even the scientific method has this sort of expectation! You can imagine getting close to those percentages, with regards to consensus opinion. That's just a question of educating people to respond appropriately.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  No. Whether a person should eat a certain number of small rocks each day is not a matter of opinion, it's not a deep philosophical problem and it's not a question whose truth is not resolveable. You should not be eating rocks.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    You choose such an edge case question - how about this sort of thing: Which is the best political party? Are the side effects to X medical treatment? I bet there are even cases when eating rocks is ok! PS It has been written about: https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-rocks/ https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-... > Lithophagia is a subset of geophagia and is a habit of eating pebbles or rocks. In the setting of famine and poverty, consuming earth matter may serve as an appetite suppressant or filler. Geophagia has also been recorded in patients with anorexia nervosa. However, this behavior is usually associated with pregnancy and iron deficiency. It is also linked to mental health conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder. Would you deny a starving person information on an appetite suppressant? Also here: https://www.remineralize.org/2017/05/craving-minerals-eating-rocks-why-do-animals-and-humans-eat-rock-dust/ https://www.remineralize.org/2017/05/craving-minerals-eating... > Aside from the capuchin monkeys, other animals have also been observed to demonstrate geophagy (“soil-eating”), including but not limited to: rodents, birds, elephants, pacas and other species of primates.[1] > Researchers found that the majority of geophagy cases involve the ingestion of clay-based soil, suggesting that the binding properties of clay help absorb toxins. ^^ The point being that even your edge case example is not unambiguously correct.
    - 2y ago
mvdtnz 2y ago
> No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something. The difference is that I'm not put on the interface of a product facing hundreds of millions of users every day to feed those users incorrect information.
noncoml 2y ago
“No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too.” But even when I’m wrong I’m not 100% off. Not “to help with depression jump of a bridge” or “use glue to keep the cheese on the pizza” kind of wrong.
- fragmede 2y ago
  So you think. Seems like hubris to believe you're not though. I'm blind to what I'm blind to, and while I'd link to think I'm never wrong, the reality is that I often am. The biggest personal growth for me was in not needing to be right.
  - noncoml 2y ago
    I disagree. Not only for myself but for the vast majority of human kind. LLMs are just a statistical model. It can claim that it’s normal for pigs to have wings and fly to the moon if it’s in the training data. No human, free of a mental/cognitive disorder, will be that wrong.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Why would pigs have wings and fly to the moon be in the training data as a data source marked as serious? We can no true scotsman both sides here. No true human, free of mental/cognitive disorder would be that wrong, but neither would an LLM, with properly annotated training data would be that wrong either.
      - noncoml 2y ago
        Did you miss the part that “put glue in pizza to make the cheese stick” was in the training set?
        fragmede 2y ago
        Did you miss the part where I said properly annotated training data?
ein0p 2y ago
You don’t need to be super ai complete - GPT4 is perfectly willing and able to tell you not to eat rocks and not to mix wood glue into pizza sauce. This is a fuckup caused by not dogfooding, and by focusing on alignment for political correctness at the expense of all else. And also by wasting a ton of engineering effort on unnecessary bullshit and spreading it too thin.
Salgat 2y ago
I'm willing to bet that with a team of fact checking experts, you'd get a result that is indistinguishable from 100%.

by jerf 2y ago

SoftTalker 2y ago

> putting glue on pizza to hold the cheese on It's actually not the dumbest idea I've heard from a real person. So no surprise it might be suggested by an AI that was trained on data from real people.

krapp 2y ago
It wasn't an idea, though. It was a joke someone made on Reddit. If an AI can't tell the difference, it shouldn't be responsible for posting answers as authoritative.
- dgellow 2y ago
  Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.
    - dgellow 2y ago
      Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do
  - oldgradstudent 2y ago
    Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge. r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable. But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.
    - blablabla123 2y ago
      ...which is sometimes incredibly hard and it might not be possible because it's such a niche topic or people might be just wrong. Just thinking about Urban Myths, Conspiracy theories etc. where even without a niche factor things may sound unbelievable but actually disproving can be effort that is out of proportion
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - mvdtnz 2y ago
      I have seen a tremendous amount of bad advice on bikewrench.
      - oldgradstudent 2y ago
- dspillett 2y ago
  It may not be a joke. Perhaps it has confused making food for eating with directions for preparing food for menu photography and other advertising.
  - Fartmancer 2y ago
    The Reddit post in question was definitely a joke. This is the post in response to a user asking how to make their cheese not slide off the slice: > To get the cheese to stick I recommend mixing about 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. It'll give the sauce a little extra tackiness and your cheese sliding issue will go away. It'll also add a little unique flavor. I like Elmer's school glue, but any glue will work as long as it's non-toxic. This matches the AI's response of suggesting 1/8 a cup of glue for additional "tackiness."

benrutter 2y ago

> So 100% accurate can't be the goal. Obviously the goal is to get the responses to be less obviously stupid. I'm not sure I agree. I think you're right that 100% accuracy is potentially unfeasable as a realistic aim, but I think the question is how accurate something needs to be in order to be a useful proposition for search. AI that's as knowledgable as I am is a good achievement and helpful for a lot of use cases, but if I'm searching "What's the capital of Mongilia" someone with averageish knowledge taking a punt with "Maybe Mongoliana City?" is not helpful at all- if I can't trust AI responses to a high degree, I'd much rather just have normal search results showing me other resources I can trust. Google's bar for justifying adding AI to their search proposition isn't "be better than asking someone on the street", it's "be better than searching google without any AI results"

smashed 2y ago
The problem is that in all the shared examples, Google ai search does not respond with a Maybe xyz, question mark? like you did. It always answers with high confidence and can't seem to navigate any gray area where there are multiple differing opinions or opposing source of truths.
- namaria 2y ago
  Yeah the "manipulating language cogently is intelligence" premise that underlines this "AI" cycle is proving itself wrong in a grand way.
jerf 2y ago
I should have been more clear. I am referring to Google's goals. Humanity as an abstract concept or you personally may have other goals, but, well, perhaps I am a cynic, but I think Google's goals are rather more monetary and less idealistic than they would represent. They don't want or need (as other replies correctly point out) the AI to always be correct and accurate. Along with general cynicism with regard to any conceivable AI's ability to do that, it is also fair to point out that the web itself doesn't have that ability either. We can't even find an objective yardstick to measure an AI with that way. Google's goal is to make the bad press go away so people use the AI more so that in the indefinite but ideally near future this AI can be monetized somehow to justify the interstellar valuations being ascribed to this technology in the "if it isn't happening in two fiscal quarters or less it might as well not exist" US/Western financial markets.

bugglebeetle 2y ago

Yes, which is why the ability to sift accurate and authoritative sources from spam, propaganda, and intentionally deceptive garbage, like advertising, and present those high-quality results to the user for review and consideration, is more important than any attempt to have an AI serve a single right answer. Google, unfortunately, abandoned this problem some time ago and is now left to serve up nonsense from the melange of low-quality noise they incentivized in pursuit of profits. If they had, instead, remained focused on the former problem, it’s actually conceivable to have an LLM work more successfully from this base of knowledge.

jsemrau 2y ago

This is statistics though. Edge cases are nothing new and risk management concepts have evolved around fat tails and anomalies for decades. Therefore the statement is as naive as writing a trading agent that is 100% correct. In my opinion, this error shows lack of understanding responsible scaling architectures. If this would be their first screw up I wouldn't mind, but Google just showed us a group of diverse Nazis. If there is a need for consumer protection for online services, it is exactly stuff like this. ISO 42001 lays out in great detail that AI systems need to be tested before they are rolled out to the public. The lack of understanding of AI risk management is apparent.

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

lukev 2y ago

I feel like there's some semantic slippage around the meaning of the word "accuracy" here. I grant you, my print Encyclopedia Britannica is not 100% accurate. But the difference between it and a LLM is not just a matter of degree: there's a "chain of custody" to information that just isn't there with a LLM. Philosophers have a working definition of knowledge as being (at least†) "justified true belief." Even if a LLM is right most of the time and yields "true belief", it's not justified belief and therefore cannot yield knowledge at all. Knowledge is Google's raison d'etre and they have no business using it unless they can solve or work around this problem. † Yes, I know about the Gettier problem, but is not relevant to the point I'm making here.

jononor 2y ago
Encyclopedia Britannica is also wrong in a reproducible and fixable way. And the input queries a finite set. It's output does not change due to random or arbitrary things. It is actually possible to verify. LLMs so far seem to be entirely unverifiable.
- lukev 2y ago
  They don’t just seem it. They are by design. We talk about models “hallucinating” but that’s us bringing an external value judgement after the fact. The actual process of token generation works precisely the same. It’d be more accurate to say that models always hallucinate.
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    Yes - this is what i've been saying all the time. The term 'hallucinations' is misleading because the whole point of LLMs is that they recombine all their inputs into something 'new'. They only ever hallucinate outputs - that's their whole point!
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      Into something probable. The models that underlie these chatbots are usually overfitted, so while they usually don't repeat their training data verbatim, they can.

saagarjha 2y ago

Thankfully a billion people are not asking me for answers to things, so it's OK if I am wrong sometimes.

fragmede 2y ago
Nor am I being treated as an omniscient magic black box of knowledge. Hilariously though, polyvinyl acetate, the main ingredient in Elemers glue is used as a binding agent to keep emulsions from separating into oil and water, and is used in chewing gum, and covers citrus fruits, sweets, chocolate, and apples in a glossy finish, among other food things.

notnullorvoid 2y ago

100% accuracy should be the goal, but the way to achieve that isn't going to from teaching an AI to construct a definitive sounding answer to 100% of questions. Teaching AI how to respond with "I don't know", and give confidence scores is the path to nearing 100% accuracy.

Szpadel 2y ago

I think the biggest difference with human (and the most important one) is that human can tell you "I have no idea, this isn't my field" or "I'm just guessing here" but LLMs will confidently say to super stupid statement. AI doesn't know what it knows. if you only score where human provide answer, then human score would be probably in high 90s

pankajkumar229 2y ago
I find irony here.
antifa 2y ago
> human can tell you "I have no idea, this isn't my field" or "I'm just guessing here" I wish more of them would lol

wredue 2y ago

If I could delivery “80% correct” software for my workplace, my day would be a whole hell of a lot easier.

Swizec 2y ago

> No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something. Kahneman has a fantastic book on this called Noise. It’s all about noise in human decision making and how to counteract it. My favorite example was how even the same expert evaluating the same fingerprints on different occasions (long enough to forget) will find different results.

praisewhitey 2y ago

You're looking at it the wrong way, the goal should be 0% inaccurate. Meaning for the 20% of things it can't answer, it shouldn't make something up.

ruszki 2y ago
Nothing can be sure that it hasn’t inaccurate or incomplete knowledge. So that can’t be a goal either.

skybrian 2y ago

Or to put it another way, I think Google should have a way of saying "yes, we know this result is wrong, but we're leaving it in because it's funny." There is a demand for funny results. Someone asking “how many rocks should I eat” is looking for entertainment, so you might as well give it to them.

leptons 2y ago
The right answer is no rocks. Some mentally ill person could type that in and get "eat 1000 rocks" and then die from eating rocks, and that would be Google's fault. It's not funny. I have no doubt right now there are at least 50 youtube videos being made testing different glue's effectiveness holding cheese on a pizza. And some of those idiots are going to taste-test it, too. And then people will try it at home, some stupid kids will get sick - I have no doubt. It was a bit premature to label LLMs as "Intelligence", it's a cool parlor trick based on a shitload of power consumption and 3D graphics cards, but it's not intelligent and it probably shouldn't be telling real (stupid) humans answers that it can't verify are correct.
- nomel 2y ago
  Google is not responsible, and should never be responsible, for protecting mentally ill people from themselves. It would be at a severe detriment to the rest of us if they took on that responsibility. Society should set the bar to “a reasonable person”, otherwise you’re doomed, with no possible alternative to a nanny state.
  - leptons 2y ago
    It's not only mentally ill people that are at risk, but anyone that doesn't know it's not a good idea to put "non-toxic" glue in pizza cheese. That includes a lot of not-mentally-ill but just plain dumb people. Google didn't need to tell people that glue+pizza is a reasonable thing to do, or even just a thing. It sure did frame it like it was a legitimate response. And Google didn't even have to reply with this or anything else, they could have just supplied the links to other sites where it had been suggested, but no - they have to make a show of force with their premature foray into AI, and have it tell real people all kinds of false, and possibly dangerous things. That's an unforced error by Google that they could end up being prosecuted for.

tomrod 2y ago

If everyone can be wrong, then might the assertion that all are wrong committing this same fallacy? "Can" is not destiny, perhaps you have met people who are fully right about the basics but you just didn't sufficiently grok their correctness.

willis936 2y ago

Failing loudly is an excellent feature. "More compelling lies" is not the answer.

hatenberg 2y ago

So google decides shipping 80% distilled crap is good enough. Yay

bluefirebrand 2y ago

> You are wrong about some basic things too Sure, but probably not "add glue to pizza to get the cheese to stick" wrong...

dspillett 2y ago
At least it suggested non-toxic glue… That suggests some context about recipes needing to be safe is somehow present in its model.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  Most likely this has nothing to do with "recipes being safe" being in the model It seems the glue thing comes from a reddit shitpost from some time ago. There's a screenshot going around on twitter about it[0](11 years in the screenshot but no idea when it was taken) It specifically mentions "any glue will work as long as it is non-toxic" so best guess is that's why google output that [0]https://x.com/kurtopsahl/status/1793494822436917295?t=aBfEzD8ifYfbcTjuZdTktQ&s=19 https://x.com/kurtopsahl/status/1793494822436917295?t=aBfEzD...
  - Fartmancer 2y ago
    It is indeed from 11 years ago. Here's a direct link to the Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...
fragmede 2y ago
The thing about that is that polyvinyl acetate is that's what's in elemers glue and is also used in chewing gum, and chocolate and to make the surface of Apples more shiny, so you're probably eating glue, we just don't like to call it that. emulsifier is a better description.

verisimi 2y ago

100% correct, 80% correct lol. The thing is that truth/reality is not a thing that is resolvable. Not even the scientific method has this sort of expectation! You can imagine getting close to those percentages, with regards to consensus opinion. That's just a question of educating people to respond appropriately.

mvdtnz 2y ago
No. Whether a person should eat a certain number of small rocks each day is not a matter of opinion, it's not a deep philosophical problem and it's not a question whose truth is not resolveable. You should not be eating rocks.
- verisimi 2y ago
  You choose such an edge case question - how about this sort of thing: Which is the best political party? Are the side effects to X medical treatment? I bet there are even cases when eating rocks is ok! PS It has been written about: https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-rocks/ https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-... > Lithophagia is a subset of geophagia and is a habit of eating pebbles or rocks. In the setting of famine and poverty, consuming earth matter may serve as an appetite suppressant or filler. Geophagia has also been recorded in patients with anorexia nervosa. However, this behavior is usually associated with pregnancy and iron deficiency. It is also linked to mental health conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder. Would you deny a starving person information on an appetite suppressant? Also here: https://www.remineralize.org/2017/05/craving-minerals-eating-rocks-why-do-animals-and-humans-eat-rock-dust/ https://www.remineralize.org/2017/05/craving-minerals-eating... > Aside from the capuchin monkeys, other animals have also been observed to demonstrate geophagy (“soil-eating”), including but not limited to: rodents, birds, elephants, pacas and other species of primates.[1] > Researchers found that the majority of geophagy cases involve the ingestion of clay-based soil, suggesting that the binding properties of clay help absorb toxins. ^^ The point being that even your edge case example is not unambiguously correct.
  - 2y ago

mvdtnz 2y ago

> No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something. The difference is that I'm not put on the interface of a product facing hundreds of millions of users every day to feed those users incorrect information.

noncoml 2y ago

“No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too.” But even when I’m wrong I’m not 100% off. Not “to help with depression jump of a bridge” or “use glue to keep the cheese on the pizza” kind of wrong.

fragmede 2y ago
So you think. Seems like hubris to believe you're not though. I'm blind to what I'm blind to, and while I'd link to think I'm never wrong, the reality is that I often am. The biggest personal growth for me was in not needing to be right.
- noncoml 2y ago
  I disagree. Not only for myself but for the vast majority of human kind. LLMs are just a statistical model. It can claim that it’s normal for pigs to have wings and fly to the moon if it’s in the training data. No human, free of a mental/cognitive disorder, will be that wrong.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Why would pigs have wings and fly to the moon be in the training data as a data source marked as serious? We can no true scotsman both sides here. No true human, free of mental/cognitive disorder would be that wrong, but neither would an LLM, with properly annotated training data would be that wrong either.
    - noncoml 2y ago
      Did you miss the part that “put glue in pizza to make the cheese stick” was in the training set?
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Did you miss the part where I said properly annotated training data?

ein0p 2y ago

You don’t need to be super ai complete - GPT4 is perfectly willing and able to tell you not to eat rocks and not to mix wood glue into pizza sauce. This is a fuckup caused by not dogfooding, and by focusing on alignment for political correctness at the expense of all else. And also by wasting a ton of engineering effort on unnecessary bullshit and spreading it too thin.

Salgat 2y ago

I'm willing to bet that with a team of fact checking experts, you'd get a result that is indistinguishable from 100%.