4 ms·

LLMs are probably better than you at tasks you're not good at. There's a huge gulf between a domain expert and an LLM though. If there weren't, all the humans i

LLMs are probably better than you at tasks you're not good at. There's a huge gulf between a domain expert and an LLM though. If there weren't, all the humans in companies would be fired right now and replaced. Similarly, OpenAI and Anthropic are paying engineers a metric fuckton of money to work there. If LLMs were that big of a game changer right, they wouldn't be paying that much. Or if you make the argument that only the best humans are getting hired, they're still hiring interns & junior engineers. If that were the case those would be being replaced by LLMs and they're not. You're basically ignoring all the experts saying "LLMs suck at all these things that even beginning domain experts don't suck at" to generate your claim & then ignoring all evidence to the contrary. And you're ignoring the ways in which LLMs fall on their face to be creative that aren't language-based. Creative problem solving in ways they haven't been trained on is out of their domain while fully squarely in the domain of human intelligence. > You can claim that that's not intelligence until the cows come home, but any person able to do that would be considered a savant Computers can do arithmetic really quickly but that's not intelligence but a person computing that quickly is considered a savant. You've built up an erroneous dichotomy in your head.

anon291 2y ago
But that's exactly it, right. There are some people excellent for being the expert in one field and some people are excellent because they're extremely competent at many fields. LLMs are the latter. Sure, for any domain expert, you can easily get an LLM to trip on something. But just the shear amount of things it is above average at puts it easily into the top echelon of humans. > You're basically ignoring all the experts saying "LLMs suck at all these things that even beginning domain experts don't suck at" to generate your claim & then ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Domain expertise is not the only form of intelligence. The most interesting things often lie at the intersections of domains. As I said in another comment. There are a variety of ways to judge intillegence, and no one quantifiable metric. It's like asking if Einstein is better than Mozart. I don't know... their fields are so different. However, I think it's pretty safe to say that the modern slate of LLMs fall into the top 10% of human intelligence, simply for their breath of knowledge and ability to synthesize ideas at the cross-section of any wide number of fields.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  > some people are excellent because they're extremely competent at many fields. LLMs are the latter But they're not. The people who are extremely competent at many fields will still outperform LLMs in those fields. The LLM can basically only outperform a complete beginner in the area & makes up for that weakness by scaling up the amount it can output which a human can't match. That doesn't take away from the fact that the output is complete garbage when given anything it doesn't know the answer to. As I noted elsewhere, ask it to provide an implementation of the S3 ListObjects operation (like the actual backend) and see what BS it tries to output to the point where you have to spend a good amount of time to convince it just to not output an example of using the S3 ListObjects API. > I think it's pretty safe to say that the modern slate of LLMs fall into the top 10% of human intelligence, simply for their breath of knowledge and ability to synthesize ideas at the cross-section of any wide number of fields. Again, evidence assumed that's not been submitted. Please provide an indication of any truly novel ideas being synthesized by LLMs that are a cross-section of fields.
  - anon291 2y ago
    > Please provide an indication of any truly novel ideas being synthesized by LLMs that are a cross-section of fields. The problem here is that you expect something akin to relativity, the Poincare conjecture, et al. The vast majority of humans are not able to do this. If you restrict yourself to the sorts of creativity that average people are good at, the models do extremely well. I'm not sure how to convince you of this. Ideally, I'd get a few people of above average intelligence together, and give them an hour (?) to work on some problem / creative endeavor (we'd have to restrict their tool use to the equivalent of whatever we allow GPT to have), and then we can compare the results. EDIT: Here's what ChatGPT thinks we should do: https://chatgpt.com/share/673b90ca-8dd4-8010-a1a0-61af699a44f0 https://chatgpt.com/share/673b90ca-8dd4-8010-a1a0-61af699a44...
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      But why is comparing against untrained humans the benchmark? ChatGPT has literally been trained on so much more data than a human would ever see & use so much more energy. Let's compare like against like. Benchmarks like FrontierMath are important and one extreme - passing it would indicate that either the questions are part of the training set or genuine creativity and skill has been developed for the AI system. The important thing is that people keep growing - they can go from student to expert. AI systems do not have that growth capability which indicates a very important thing is missing from their intelligence capability. I want to be clear - I'm talking about the intelligence of AI systems available today and today only. There's lots of reason to be enthusiastic about the future but similarly very cautious about understanding what is available today & what is available today isn't human-like.

anon291 2y ago

But that's exactly it, right. There are some people excellent for being the expert in one field and some people are excellent because they're extremely competent at many fields. LLMs are the latter. Sure, for any domain expert, you can easily get an LLM to trip on something. But just the shear amount of things it is above average at puts it easily into the top echelon of humans. > You're basically ignoring all the experts saying "LLMs suck at all these things that even beginning domain experts don't suck at" to generate your claim & then ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Domain expertise is not the only form of intelligence. The most interesting things often lie at the intersections of domains. As I said in another comment. There are a variety of ways to judge intillegence, and no one quantifiable metric. It's like asking if Einstein is better than Mozart. I don't know... their fields are so different. However, I think it's pretty safe to say that the modern slate of LLMs fall into the top 10% of human intelligence, simply for their breath of knowledge and ability to synthesize ideas at the cross-section of any wide number of fields.

vlovich123 2y ago
> some people are excellent because they're extremely competent at many fields. LLMs are the latter But they're not. The people who are extremely competent at many fields will still outperform LLMs in those fields. The LLM can basically only outperform a complete beginner in the area & makes up for that weakness by scaling up the amount it can output which a human can't match. That doesn't take away from the fact that the output is complete garbage when given anything it doesn't know the answer to. As I noted elsewhere, ask it to provide an implementation of the S3 ListObjects operation (like the actual backend) and see what BS it tries to output to the point where you have to spend a good amount of time to convince it just to not output an example of using the S3 ListObjects API. > I think it's pretty safe to say that the modern slate of LLMs fall into the top 10% of human intelligence, simply for their breath of knowledge and ability to synthesize ideas at the cross-section of any wide number of fields. Again, evidence assumed that's not been submitted. Please provide an indication of any truly novel ideas being synthesized by LLMs that are a cross-section of fields.
- anon291 2y ago
  > Please provide an indication of any truly novel ideas being synthesized by LLMs that are a cross-section of fields. The problem here is that you expect something akin to relativity, the Poincare conjecture, et al. The vast majority of humans are not able to do this. If you restrict yourself to the sorts of creativity that average people are good at, the models do extremely well. I'm not sure how to convince you of this. Ideally, I'd get a few people of above average intelligence together, and give them an hour (?) to work on some problem / creative endeavor (we'd have to restrict their tool use to the equivalent of whatever we allow GPT to have), and then we can compare the results. EDIT: Here's what ChatGPT thinks we should do: https://chatgpt.com/share/673b90ca-8dd4-8010-a1a0-61af699a44f0 https://chatgpt.com/share/673b90ca-8dd4-8010-a1a0-61af699a44...
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    But why is comparing against untrained humans the benchmark? ChatGPT has literally been trained on so much more data than a human would ever see & use so much more energy. Let's compare like against like. Benchmarks like FrontierMath are important and one extreme - passing it would indicate that either the questions are part of the training set or genuine creativity and skill has been developed for the AI system. The important thing is that people keep growing - they can go from student to expert. AI systems do not have that growth capability which indicates a very important thing is missing from their intelligence capability. I want to be clear - I'm talking about the intelligence of AI systems available today and today only. There's lots of reason to be enthusiastic about the future but similarly very cautious about understanding what is available today & what is available today isn't human-like.