6 ms·

LLM are a compressed version of their training dataset with a text based interactive search function.

Salgat 1y ago
LLMs require the sum total of human knowledge to ape what you can find on google, meanwhile Ramanujan achieved brilliant discoveries in mathematics using nothing but a grade school education and a few math books.
- rowanG077 1y ago
  You phrase it as a diss but "Yeah LLM suck, they aren't even as smart as Ramanujan" sounds like a high praise to me.
  - Salgat 1y ago
    Unfortunately LLMs fail even basic logic tests given to children so definitely not high praise. I'm just highlighting the absurd amount of data they need versus humans to highlight that they're just spitting out regressions on the training data. We're talking data that would take a human countless thousands of lifetimes to ingest. Yet a human can accomplish infinitely more with a basic grade school education.
    - jbstack 1y ago
      Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. LLMs can display a basic level of competency (with some mistakes) in almost any topic known to mankind. No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former, and humans certainly cannot do the latter. You're comparing apples and oranges. Also, your comparison is unfair. You've chosen an exceptional high achiever as your example of a human to compare against LLMs. If you instead compare the average human, LLMs don't look so bad even when the human has the advantage of specialisation (e.g. medical diagnostics). A LLM can do reasonably well against an average (not exceptional) person with just a basic grade school education if asked to produce an essay on some topic.
      - mhuffman 1y ago
        >Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. >No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former I can feel Sam Altman's rage building ...
        weatherlite 1y ago
        Yeah, I think many investors do expect that ...
      - Salgat 1y ago
        With Google I can demonstrate a wide breadth of knowledge too. LLM's aren't unique in that aspect.
lexandstuff 1y ago
Yes, but you're missing their ability to interpolate across that dataset at retrieval time, which is what makes them extremely useful. Also, people are willing to invest a lot of money to keep building those datasets, until nearly everything of economic value is in there.
- beeflet 1y ago
  not everything of economic value is data retrieval
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Most economic value is not data retrieval
    - HaZeust 1y ago
      The stock market is the root for the majority of all the world's economic value, and has almost-exclusively been data retrieval since 2001.
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        Come on. The stock market is not just data retrieval. The statement doesn’t even make sense.
        HaZeust 1y ago
        It makes perfect sense, and I meant what I said. 60% of all US equity volume is pure high-frequency trading, and ETFs add roughly another 20% that’s literally just bots responding to market activity and bearish-bullish sentiment analysis on public(?) press releases. 2/3 of trading funds also rely on external data to price in decisions, and I think it was around 90% in 2021 use trading algorithms as their determining factor for their high-frequency trade strategies. At its core, the movements that make up the market really IS data retrieval.
echelon 1y ago
LLMs are useful in that respect. As are media diffusion models. They've compressed the physics of light, the rules of composition, the structure of prose, the knowledge of the internet, etc. and made it infinitely remixable and accessible to laypersons. AGI, on the other hand, should really stand for Aspirationally Grifting Investors. Superintelligence is not around the corner. OpenAI knows this and is trying to become a hyperscaler / Mag7 company with the foothold they've established and the capital that they've raised. Despite that, they need a tremendous amount of additional capital to will themselves into becoming the next new Google. The best way to do that is to sell the idea of superintelligence. AGI is a grift. We don't even have a definition for it.
- EGreg 1y ago
  I an not an expert but I have a serious counterpoint. While training LLMs to replicate the human output, the intelligence and understanding EMERGES in the internal layers. It seems trivial to do unsupervised training on scientific data, for instance, such as star movements, and discover closed-form analytic models for their movements. Deriving Kepler’s laws and Newton’s equations should be fast and trivial, and by that afternoon you’d have much more profound models with 500+ variables which humans would struggle to understand but can explain the data. AGI is what, Artificial General Intelligence? What exactly do we mean by general? Mark Twain said “we are all idiots, just on different subjects”. These LLMs are already better than 90% of humans at understanding any subject, in the sense of answering questions about that subject and carrying on meaningful and reasonable discussion. Yes occasionally they stumble or make a mistake, but overall it is very impressive. And remember — if we care about practical outcomes - as soon as ONE model can do something, ALL COPIES OF IT CAN. So you can reliably get unlimited agents that are better than 90% of humans at understanding every subject. That is a very powerful baseline for replacing most jobs, isn’t it?
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    Indeed 90% problems can be solved by googling and that's what LLMs do. AGI is expected to be something more than a talking encyclopedia.
  - deleted 1y ago
bdelmas 1y ago
Exactly I am so tired to hear about AI… And they are not even AI! I am also losing faith in this field when I see how much they all push so much hype and lies like this instead of being transparent. They are not AGIs not even AIs… For now they are only models and your definition is a good one
- ghost-of-wires 1y ago
  > they are not even AI! From the "Artificial Intelligence" Wikipedia page: old-school Google search is AI, chess bots are AI, Google Maps is AI, the YouTube recommendation algorithm is AI... LLMs are definitely AI.
sporkland 1y ago
yeah I've been thinking about them as stochastic content addressable memory. You can put as many next = userInput; while(true's) { next = mem[next]; } around them as you need in different forms. Single shot. Agents. etc and get wildly cool results out, but it's gated by some of the limitations there.

LLMs require the sum total of human knowledge to ape what you can find on google, meanwhile Ramanujan achieved brilliant discoveries in mathematics using nothing but a grade school education and a few math books.

rowanG077 1y ago
You phrase it as a diss but "Yeah LLM suck, they aren't even as smart as Ramanujan" sounds like a high praise to me.
- Salgat 1y ago
  Unfortunately LLMs fail even basic logic tests given to children so definitely not high praise. I'm just highlighting the absurd amount of data they need versus humans to highlight that they're just spitting out regressions on the training data. We're talking data that would take a human countless thousands of lifetimes to ingest. Yet a human can accomplish infinitely more with a basic grade school education.
  - jbstack 1y ago
    Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. LLMs can display a basic level of competency (with some mistakes) in almost any topic known to mankind. No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former, and humans certainly cannot do the latter. You're comparing apples and oranges. Also, your comparison is unfair. You've chosen an exceptional high achiever as your example of a human to compare against LLMs. If you instead compare the average human, LLMs don't look so bad even when the human has the advantage of specialisation (e.g. medical diagnostics). A LLM can do reasonably well against an average (not exceptional) person with just a basic grade school education if asked to produce an essay on some topic.
    - mhuffman 1y ago
      >Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. >No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former I can feel Sam Altman's rage building ...
      - weatherlite 1y ago
        Yeah, I think many investors do expect that ...
    - Salgat 1y ago
      With Google I can demonstrate a wide breadth of knowledge too. LLM's aren't unique in that aspect.

lexandstuff 1y ago

Yes, but you're missing their ability to interpolate across that dataset at retrieval time, which is what makes them extremely useful. Also, people are willing to invest a lot of money to keep building those datasets, until nearly everything of economic value is in there.

beeflet 1y ago
not everything of economic value is data retrieval
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Most economic value is not data retrieval
  - HaZeust 1y ago
    The stock market is the root for the majority of all the world's economic value, and has almost-exclusively been data retrieval since 2001.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      Come on. The stock market is not just data retrieval. The statement doesn’t even make sense.
      - HaZeust 1y ago
        It makes perfect sense, and I meant what I said. 60% of all US equity volume is pure high-frequency trading, and ETFs add roughly another 20% that’s literally just bots responding to market activity and bearish-bullish sentiment analysis on public(?) press releases. 2/3 of trading funds also rely on external data to price in decisions, and I think it was around 90% in 2021 use trading algorithms as their determining factor for their high-frequency trade strategies. At its core, the movements that make up the market really IS data retrieval.

echelon 1y ago

LLMs are useful in that respect. As are media diffusion models. They've compressed the physics of light, the rules of composition, the structure of prose, the knowledge of the internet, etc. and made it infinitely remixable and accessible to laypersons. AGI, on the other hand, should really stand for Aspirationally Grifting Investors. Superintelligence is not around the corner. OpenAI knows this and is trying to become a hyperscaler / Mag7 company with the foothold they've established and the capital that they've raised. Despite that, they need a tremendous amount of additional capital to will themselves into becoming the next new Google. The best way to do that is to sell the idea of superintelligence. AGI is a grift. We don't even have a definition for it.

EGreg 1y ago
I an not an expert but I have a serious counterpoint. While training LLMs to replicate the human output, the intelligence and understanding EMERGES in the internal layers. It seems trivial to do unsupervised training on scientific data, for instance, such as star movements, and discover closed-form analytic models for their movements. Deriving Kepler’s laws and Newton’s equations should be fast and trivial, and by that afternoon you’d have much more profound models with 500+ variables which humans would struggle to understand but can explain the data. AGI is what, Artificial General Intelligence? What exactly do we mean by general? Mark Twain said “we are all idiots, just on different subjects”. These LLMs are already better than 90% of humans at understanding any subject, in the sense of answering questions about that subject and carrying on meaningful and reasonable discussion. Yes occasionally they stumble or make a mistake, but overall it is very impressive. And remember — if we care about practical outcomes - as soon as ONE model can do something, ALL COPIES OF IT CAN. So you can reliably get unlimited agents that are better than 90% of humans at understanding every subject. That is a very powerful baseline for replacing most jobs, isn’t it?
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Indeed 90% problems can be solved by googling and that's what LLMs do. AGI is expected to be something more than a talking encyclopedia.
- deleted 1y ago

bdelmas 1y ago

Exactly I am so tired to hear about AI… And they are not even AI! I am also losing faith in this field when I see how much they all push so much hype and lies like this instead of being transparent. They are not AGIs not even AIs… For now they are only models and your definition is a good one

ghost-of-wires 1y ago
> they are not even AI! From the "Artificial Intelligence" Wikipedia page: old-school Google search is AI, chess bots are AI, Google Maps is AI, the YouTube recommendation algorithm is AI... LLMs are definitely AI.

sporkland 1y ago

yeah I've been thinking about them as stochastic content addressable memory. You can put as many next = userInput; while(true's) { next = mem[next]; } around them as you need in different forms. Single shot. Agents. etc and get wildly cool results out, but it's gated by some of the limitations there.