4 ms·

i’ll bite. a magic 8 ball is a twenty sided die and a magnifying glass. any supervisor can roll the die until they see all twenty possible answers. a magic 8

i’ll bite. a magic 8 ball is a twenty sided die and a magnifying glass. any supervisor can roll the die until they see all twenty possible answers. a magic 8 ball has infinite questions with 20 finite answers. a GPT by definition has infinite answers as they are derived on demand by infinite questions, therefore, it can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball.

fluoridation 2y ago
"Magic 8 ball" is obviously a metaphor about how an LLM's output has little connection with reality. You also don't take an LLM in your hands and shake it to make it produce output.
- tylerchilds 2y ago
  “therefore” is the context in this part of the thread, as the comment i was replying to was honing in on that, the magic 8 ball needing to be a magic 8 ball and not a metaphor. they got confused about how though they’re both disconnected from reality, one still has roots in probability theory and can reasoned about by an adult supervisor, whereas the other one is so divorced from reality that the phrase “magic 8 ball” ceases to lose meaning and must be pedantically debated on an internet forum before they can decide it isn’t something they should give their kids, like a magic 8 ball.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    But the other person said that the LLM can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball not because it's much more divorced from reality, but because its guardrails are failing. If it was just a matter of disconnection then the metaphor was never appropriate to begin with (although I disagree that LLMs are much more divorced from reality than magic 8 balls). The, by my interpretation, non sequitur is that a guardrailed magic 8 ball that has imperfect guardrails is no longer a magic 8 ball, even though by default magic 8 balls don't have guardrails; a magic 8 ball may very well tell you that it's a good idea to do something recklessly stupid and dangerous.
    - tylerchilds 2y ago
      i defined the guard rails of a magic 8 ball as being a twenty sided probability problem. what position are you even standing for right now?

fluoridation 2y ago

"Magic 8 ball" is obviously a metaphor about how an LLM's output has little connection with reality. You also don't take an LLM in your hands and shake it to make it produce output.

tylerchilds 2y ago
“therefore” is the context in this part of the thread, as the comment i was replying to was honing in on that, the magic 8 ball needing to be a magic 8 ball and not a metaphor. they got confused about how though they’re both disconnected from reality, one still has roots in probability theory and can reasoned about by an adult supervisor, whereas the other one is so divorced from reality that the phrase “magic 8 ball” ceases to lose meaning and must be pedantically debated on an internet forum before they can decide it isn’t something they should give their kids, like a magic 8 ball.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  But the other person said that the LLM can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball not because it's much more divorced from reality, but because its guardrails are failing. If it was just a matter of disconnection then the metaphor was never appropriate to begin with (although I disagree that LLMs are much more divorced from reality than magic 8 balls). The, by my interpretation, non sequitur is that a guardrailed magic 8 ball that has imperfect guardrails is no longer a magic 8 ball, even though by default magic 8 balls don't have guardrails; a magic 8 ball may very well tell you that it's a good idea to do something recklessly stupid and dangerous.
  - tylerchilds 2y ago
    i defined the guard rails of a magic 8 ball as being a twenty sided probability problem. what position are you even standing for right now?