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> Conclusion > LLMs are really smart most of the time. No, the conclusion is they’re never “smart”. All they do is regurgitate text which resembles a continua
by latexr 2y ago
> Conclusion
> LLMs are really smart most of the time.
No, the conclusion is they’re never “smart”. All they do is regurgitate text which resembles a continuation of what came before, and sometimes—but with zero guarantees—that text aligns with reality.
- miningape 2y agoThis, thank you. It pisses me off to no end when people pretend LLMs are smart. They are nothing but a well trained random text generator. Seriously, some these conversations feel like interacting someone who believes casting bones and astrology are accurate. Likely because in both cases they are a result of confirmation bias.
- immibis 2y agoWe don't know what smartness is. What if that's what smartness is?
- miningape 2y agoWe might not know what it is, but it's not that. At a bare minimum smartness requires abstract reasoning (and no, so-called "reasoning" models do not do that - it's a marketing trick) The burden of proof for that claim is on you, we cannot start with the assumption these are intelligent systems and disprove it - we have to start with the fact that training is a non-deterministic process and prove that it exhibits intelligence.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- econ 2y agoSmart is when you extract billions but deliver nothing of value.
- BrenBarn 2y agoSimilar the thing at the end with "I find it endearing". I mean, the author feels what he feels, but personally I find this LLM behavior disgusting and depressing.
- jonas21 2y agoSame as you and me, really.
- kubb 2y agoPeople use the general impressiveness of language produced by humans as a proxy measuring their intelligence, that’s how LLMs became AI. The amount of code out there lets LLMs learn on examples of a lot of tasks and pass SWE benchmarks. Smart autocomplete and solved problem lookup has value. Even if it doesn’t always work correctly, and doesn’t know what it knows. And for non-programmers they’re indistinguishable from programmers. They produce working code. It’s easy to see how a product manager or a designer or even a manager that didn’t code for years in a large company can think they’re almost as good as devs.
- visarga 2y ago> All they do is regurgitate text which resembles a continuation of what came before, and sometimes—but with zero guarantees—that text aligns with reality. You mean like us? Because it takes many runs and debug rounds to make anything that works. Can you write a complex code top-to-bottom in one round, or do you gradually test it to catch bugs you have "hallucinated"? Both humans and LLMs get into bugs, the question is can we push this to the correct solution or get permanently stuck along the way? And this depends on feedback, sometimes access to a testing environment where we can't let AI run loose.
- latexr 2y ago> You mean like us? Not, not like us. This constant comparison of LLMs to humans is tiresome and unproductive. I’m not a proponent of human exceptionalism, but pretending LLMs are on par is embarrassing. If you want to claim your thinking ability isn’t any better than an LLM, that’s your prerogative, but the dullest human I’m acquainted with is still capable of remembering and thinking through in a way no LLM does. Heck, I can think of pets which do better. > Can you write a complex code top-to-bottom in one round, or do you gradually test it to catch bugs you have "hallucinated"? I certainly don’t make up methods which don’t exist, nor do I insist over and over they are valid, nor do I repeat “I’m sorry, this was indeed not right” then say the same thing again. I have never “hallucinated” a feature then doubled down when confronted with proof it doesn’t exist, nor have I ever shifted my approach entirely because someone simply said the opposite without explanation. I certainly hope you don’t do that either.
- visarga 2y agoThey are on par on many tasks, surpass us in some tasks, and catching up on the rest quite fast. Both humans and LLMs forget details, both have to go through iterative bug fixing when creating something. Longer contexts and memory are coming, they already exist but need improvement. > I have never “hallucinated” a feature You never mistook an argument, or forgot one of the 100 details we have to mind while writing complex apps? I would rather measure humans vs AI not in basic skill capability but in authonomy. I think AI still has much more to catch up on that front.