7 ms·

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by Xmd5a 1y ago

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rvnx 1y ago
A LLM is essentially the world information packed into a very compact format. It is the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Claiming that your own knowledge is better than all the compressed consensus of the books of the universe, is very optimistic. If you are not sure about the result given by a LLM, it is your task as a human to cross-verify the information. The exact same way that information in books is not 100% accurate, and that Google results are not always telling the truth.
- TheEdonian 1y ago
  Well let's not forget that it's an opinionated source. There is also the point that if you ask it about a topic it will (often) give you the answer that has the most content about it (or easiest to access information).
  - illiac786 1y ago
    Agree. I find that, for many, LLMs are addictive, a magnet, because it offers to do your work for you, or so it appears. Resisting this temptation is impossibly hard for children for example, and many adults succumb. A good way to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about its output and keep on checking this output, is asking the LLM about something that happened after the training cut off. For example, I asked if lidar could damage phone lenses. And the LLM very convincingly argued it was highly improbable. Because that recently made the news as a danger for phone lenses, and wasn’t part of the training data. This helps me stay sane and resist the temptation of just accepting LLM output =) On a side note, the kagi assistant is nice for kids I feel because it links to its sources.
    - dale_glass 1y ago
      LIDAR damaging the lens is extremely unlikely. A lens is mostly glass. What it can damage is the sensor, which is actually not at all the same thing as a lens. When asking questions it's important to ask the right question.
      - illiac786 1y ago
        Sorry, I meant the sensor
    - criley2 1y ago
      I asked ChatGPT o3 if lidar could damage phone sensors and it said yes https://chatgpt.com/share/683ee007-7338-800e-a6a4-cebc293c469f https://chatgpt.com/share/683ee007-7338-800e-a6a4-cebc293c46... I also asked Gemini 2.5 pro preview and it said yes. https://g.co/gemini/share/0aeded9b8220 https://g.co/gemini/share/0aeded9b8220 I find it interesting to always test for myself when someone suggests to me that a "LLM" failed at a task.
      - illiac786 1y ago
        I should have been more specific, but you missed my point I believe. I tested this at the time on Claude 3.7 sonnet, which have an earlier cut off date and I just tested again with this prompt: “Can the lidar of a self driving car damage a phone camera sensor?” and the answer is still wrong in my test. I believe the issue is the training cut off date, that’s my point, LLM seem smart but they have limits and when asked about something discovered after training cut off date, they will sometimes confidently be wrong.
        criley2 1y ago
        I didn't miss your point, rather I wanted you to realize some deeper points I was trying to make - Not all LLM are the same, and not identifying your tool is problematic because "LLM's can't do a thing" is very different than "The particular model I used failed at this thing". I demonstrated that by showing that many LLMs get the answer right. It puts the onus of correctness entirely on the category of technology, and not the tool used or the skill of the tool user. - Training data cutoffs are only one part of the equation: Tool use by LLM's allows them to search the internet and run arbitrary code (amongst many other things). In both of my cases, the training data did not include the results either. Both used a tool call to search the internet for data. Not realizing that modern AI tools are more than an LLM with training data, but rather have tool calling, full internet access, and can access and reason about a wide variety of up to date data sources demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about modern AI tools. Having said that: Claude Sonnet 4.0 says "yes": https://claude.ai/share/001e16f8-20ea-4941-a181-48311252bca0 https://claude.ai/share/001e16f8-20ea-4941-a181-48311252bca0 Personally, I don't use Claude for this kind of thing because while it's proven to be a very good at being a coding assistant and interacting with my IDE in an "agentic" manner, it's clearly not designed to be a deep research assistant that broadly searches the internet and other data sources to provide accurate and up to date information. (This would mean that ai/model selection is a skill issue and getting good results from AI tools is a skill, which is borne out by the fact that I get the right answer every time I try, and you can't get the right answer once).
- ivape 1y ago
  This is pre-Covid HN thread on work from home: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507 It’s eerie. It’s historical. These threads from these past two years about what the future of AI will be will read like ghost stories. Like Rose having flash backs of the Titanic. It’s worth documenting. We honestly could be having the most ominous discussion of what’s to come. We sit around and complain about dips in hiring, that’s nothing. The iceberg just hit. We’ve got 6 hours left.
  - ignoramous 1y ago
    > We sit around and complain about dips in hiring, that’s nothing. The iceberg just hit. We’ve got 6 hours left. At least we've got hacker news to ourselves, have we not ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130743
- fennecfoxy 1y ago
  >LLM is essentially the world information packed into a very compact format. No, it's world information distilled to various parts and details that training deemed important. Do not pretend for one second that it's not an incredibly lossy compression method, which is why LLMs hallucinate constantly. This is why training is only useful for teaching the LLM how to string words together to convey hard data. That hard data should always be retrieved via RAG with an independent model/code verifying that the contents of the response are correct as per the hard data. Even 4o hallucinates constantly if it doesn't do a web search and sometimes even when it does.
- Pamar 1y ago
  Partially OT: Yesterday I asked Chat GPT which was the Japanese Twin City for Venice (Italy). This was just a quick offhand question because I needed the answer for a post on IG, so not exactly a death or life situation. Answer: Kagoshima. It also added that the "twin status" was officially set in 1965, and that Kagoshima was the starting point for the Jesuit Missionary Alessandro Valignano in his attempt to proselitize Japanese people (to Catholicism, and also about European Culture). I never heard of Kagoshima, so I googled for it. And discovered it is the twin city of Neaples :/ So I then googled for "Venice Japanese Twin City" and got: Hiroshima. I doublechecked this then I went back to ChatGPT and wrote: "Kagoshima is the Twin City for Neaples.". This triggered a websearch and finally it wrote back: "You are right, Kagoshima is Twin City of Neaples since 1960." Then it added "Regarding Venice instead, the twin city is Hiroshima, since 2023". So yeah, a Library of Alexandria that you can count on as long as you have another couple of libraries to doublechek whatever you get from it. Note also that this was very straightforward question, there is nothing to "analyze" or "interpret" or "reason about". And yet the answer was completely wrong, the first date was incorrect even for Neaples (actually the ceremony was in May 1960) and the extra bits about Alessandro Valignano are not reported anywhere else: Valignano was indeed a Jesuit and he visited Japan multiple times, but Kagoshima is never mentioned when you google for him or if you check his wikipedia page. You may understand how I remain quite skeptical for any application which I consider "more important than an IG title".
  - rvnx 1y ago
    Claude 4 Opus: > Venice, Italy does not appear to have a Japanese twin city or sister city. While several Japanese cities have earned the nickname "Venice of Japan" for their canal systems or waterfront architecture, there is no formal sister city relationship between Venice and any Japanese city that I could find in the available information I think GPT-4o got it wrong in your case because it searched Bing, and then read only fragments of the page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_twin_towns_and_sister_cities_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_twin_towns_and_sister_... ) to save costs for processing "large" context
    - Pamar 1y ago
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Even if this were true (it is not; that’s not how LLMs work), well, there was a lot of complete nonsense in the Library of Alexandria.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    It's a compressed statistical representation of text patterns, so it is absolutely true. You lose information during the process, but the quality is similar to the source data. Sometimes even above, as there is consensus when information is repeated across multiple sources.
    - brahma-dev 1y ago
      It's amazing how it goes from all the knowledge in the world to ** terms and conditions apply, all answers are subject to market risks, please read the offer documents carefully.........
- sethammons 1y ago
  No, don't think libraries, think "the Internet." The Internet thinks all kinds of things that are not true.
  - mavhc 1y ago
    Just like books then, except the internet can be updated
    - rvnx 1y ago
      We all remember those teachers that said that internet cannot be trusted, and that only source of truth is in books.
jrvarela56 1y ago
10 month old account talking like that to the village elder
foldr 1y ago
In fairness, the article is a lot more condescending and insulting to its readers than the comment you're replying to.

[flagged]

by Xmd5a 1y ago

[flagged]

rvnx 1y ago

A LLM is essentially the world information packed into a very compact format. It is the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Claiming that your own knowledge is better than all the compressed consensus of the books of the universe, is very optimistic. If you are not sure about the result given by a LLM, it is your task as a human to cross-verify the information. The exact same way that information in books is not 100% accurate, and that Google results are not always telling the truth.

TheEdonian 1y ago
Well let's not forget that it's an opinionated source. There is also the point that if you ask it about a topic it will (often) give you the answer that has the most content about it (or easiest to access information).
- illiac786 1y ago
  Agree. I find that, for many, LLMs are addictive, a magnet, because it offers to do your work for you, or so it appears. Resisting this temptation is impossibly hard for children for example, and many adults succumb. A good way to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about its output and keep on checking this output, is asking the LLM about something that happened after the training cut off. For example, I asked if lidar could damage phone lenses. And the LLM very convincingly argued it was highly improbable. Because that recently made the news as a danger for phone lenses, and wasn’t part of the training data. This helps me stay sane and resist the temptation of just accepting LLM output =) On a side note, the kagi assistant is nice for kids I feel because it links to its sources.
  - dale_glass 1y ago
    LIDAR damaging the lens is extremely unlikely. A lens is mostly glass. What it can damage is the sensor, which is actually not at all the same thing as a lens. When asking questions it's important to ask the right question.
    - illiac786 1y ago
      Sorry, I meant the sensor
  - criley2 1y ago
    I asked ChatGPT o3 if lidar could damage phone sensors and it said yes https://chatgpt.com/share/683ee007-7338-800e-a6a4-cebc293c469f https://chatgpt.com/share/683ee007-7338-800e-a6a4-cebc293c46... I also asked Gemini 2.5 pro preview and it said yes. https://g.co/gemini/share/0aeded9b8220 https://g.co/gemini/share/0aeded9b8220 I find it interesting to always test for myself when someone suggests to me that a "LLM" failed at a task.
    - illiac786 1y ago
      I should have been more specific, but you missed my point I believe. I tested this at the time on Claude 3.7 sonnet, which have an earlier cut off date and I just tested again with this prompt: “Can the lidar of a self driving car damage a phone camera sensor?” and the answer is still wrong in my test. I believe the issue is the training cut off date, that’s my point, LLM seem smart but they have limits and when asked about something discovered after training cut off date, they will sometimes confidently be wrong.
      - criley2 1y ago
        I didn't miss your point, rather I wanted you to realize some deeper points I was trying to make - Not all LLM are the same, and not identifying your tool is problematic because "LLM's can't do a thing" is very different than "The particular model I used failed at this thing". I demonstrated that by showing that many LLMs get the answer right. It puts the onus of correctness entirely on the category of technology, and not the tool used or the skill of the tool user. - Training data cutoffs are only one part of the equation: Tool use by LLM's allows them to search the internet and run arbitrary code (amongst many other things). In both of my cases, the training data did not include the results either. Both used a tool call to search the internet for data. Not realizing that modern AI tools are more than an LLM with training data, but rather have tool calling, full internet access, and can access and reason about a wide variety of up to date data sources demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about modern AI tools. Having said that: Claude Sonnet 4.0 says "yes": https://claude.ai/share/001e16f8-20ea-4941-a181-48311252bca0 https://claude.ai/share/001e16f8-20ea-4941-a181-48311252bca0 Personally, I don't use Claude for this kind of thing because while it's proven to be a very good at being a coding assistant and interacting with my IDE in an "agentic" manner, it's clearly not designed to be a deep research assistant that broadly searches the internet and other data sources to provide accurate and up to date information. (This would mean that ai/model selection is a skill issue and getting good results from AI tools is a skill, which is borne out by the fact that I get the right answer every time I try, and you can't get the right answer once).
ivape 1y ago
This is pre-Covid HN thread on work from home: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507 It’s eerie. It’s historical. These threads from these past two years about what the future of AI will be will read like ghost stories. Like Rose having flash backs of the Titanic. It’s worth documenting. We honestly could be having the most ominous discussion of what’s to come. We sit around and complain about dips in hiring, that’s nothing. The iceberg just hit. We’ve got 6 hours left.
- ignoramous 1y ago
  > We sit around and complain about dips in hiring, that’s nothing. The iceberg just hit. We’ve got 6 hours left. At least we've got hacker news to ourselves, have we not ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130743
fennecfoxy 1y ago
>LLM is essentially the world information packed into a very compact format. No, it's world information distilled to various parts and details that training deemed important. Do not pretend for one second that it's not an incredibly lossy compression method, which is why LLMs hallucinate constantly. This is why training is only useful for teaching the LLM how to string words together to convey hard data. That hard data should always be retrieved via RAG with an independent model/code verifying that the contents of the response are correct as per the hard data. Even 4o hallucinates constantly if it doesn't do a web search and sometimes even when it does.
Pamar 1y ago
Partially OT: Yesterday I asked Chat GPT which was the Japanese Twin City for Venice (Italy). This was just a quick offhand question because I needed the answer for a post on IG, so not exactly a death or life situation. Answer: Kagoshima. It also added that the "twin status" was officially set in 1965, and that Kagoshima was the starting point for the Jesuit Missionary Alessandro Valignano in his attempt to proselitize Japanese people (to Catholicism, and also about European Culture). I never heard of Kagoshima, so I googled for it. And discovered it is the twin city of Neaples :/ So I then googled for "Venice Japanese Twin City" and got: Hiroshima. I doublechecked this then I went back to ChatGPT and wrote: "Kagoshima is the Twin City for Neaples.". This triggered a websearch and finally it wrote back: "You are right, Kagoshima is Twin City of Neaples since 1960." Then it added "Regarding Venice instead, the twin city is Hiroshima, since 2023". So yeah, a Library of Alexandria that you can count on as long as you have another couple of libraries to doublechek whatever you get from it. Note also that this was very straightforward question, there is nothing to "analyze" or "interpret" or "reason about". And yet the answer was completely wrong, the first date was incorrect even for Neaples (actually the ceremony was in May 1960) and the extra bits about Alessandro Valignano are not reported anywhere else: Valignano was indeed a Jesuit and he visited Japan multiple times, but Kagoshima is never mentioned when you google for him or if you check his wikipedia page. You may understand how I remain quite skeptical for any application which I consider "more important than an IG title".
- rvnx 1y ago
  Claude 4 Opus: > Venice, Italy does not appear to have a Japanese twin city or sister city. While several Japanese cities have earned the nickname "Venice of Japan" for their canal systems or waterfront architecture, there is no formal sister city relationship between Venice and any Japanese city that I could find in the available information I think GPT-4o got it wrong in your case because it searched Bing, and then read only fragments of the page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_twin_towns_and_sister_cities_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_twin_towns_and_sister_... ) to save costs for processing "large" context
  - Pamar 1y ago
rsynnott 1y ago
Even if this were true (it is not; that’s not how LLMs work), well, there was a lot of complete nonsense in the Library of Alexandria.
- rvnx 1y ago
  It's a compressed statistical representation of text patterns, so it is absolutely true. You lose information during the process, but the quality is similar to the source data. Sometimes even above, as there is consensus when information is repeated across multiple sources.
  - brahma-dev 1y ago
    It's amazing how it goes from all the knowledge in the world to ** terms and conditions apply, all answers are subject to market risks, please read the offer documents carefully.........
sethammons 1y ago
No, don't think libraries, think "the Internet." The Internet thinks all kinds of things that are not true.
- mavhc 1y ago
  Just like books then, except the internet can be updated
  - rvnx 1y ago
    We all remember those teachers that said that internet cannot be trusted, and that only source of truth is in books.

jrvarela56 1y ago

10 month old account talking like that to the village elder

foldr 1y ago

In fairness, the article is a lot more condescending and insulting to its readers than the comment you're replying to.