3 ms·

I don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?

ivape 1y ago
More information: Use the LLM more until you are convinced. If you are not convinced, use it more. Use it more in absurd ways until you are convinced. Repeat the above until you are convinced.
- piva00 1y ago
  Is this satire? Really hard to tell in this year of 2025...
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    Yeah, Poe's Law hitting hard here.
- emp17344 1y ago
  You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. Can you provide a specific example of AI “blowing your mind”?
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. So he's not just an LLM evangelist, he also writes like one.
tbrownaw 1y ago
Well there was that example a while back of some store's product recommendation algo inferring that someone was pregnant before any of the involved humans knew.
- Gerardo1 1y ago
  That's...not hard. Pregnancy produces a whole slew of relatively predictable behavior changes. The whole point of recommendation systems is to aggregate data points across services.
- shakadak 1y ago
  The ~woman~ teenager knew she was pregnant, Target's algorithm noticed her change in behavior and spilled the beans to her father.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Back in 2012, mind you.
- y0eswddl 1y ago
  That wasn't LLMs, that's the incredibly vast amounts of personal data that companies collect on us and correlate to other shoppers' habits. There was nothing involved like what we refer to as "AI" today.
ACCount37 1y ago
LLMs can have surprisingly strong "theory of mind", even at base model level. They have to learn that to get good at predicting all the various people that show up in conversation logs. You'd be surprised at just how much data you can pry out of an LLM that was merely exposed to a single long conversation with a given user. Chatbot LLMs aren't trained to expose all of those latent insights, but they can still do some of it occasionally. This can look like mind reading, at times. In practice, the LLM is just good at dredging the text for all the subtext and the unsaid implications. Some users are fairly predictable and easy to impress.
- emp17344 1y ago
  Do you have evidence to support any of this? This is the first time I’ve heard that LLMs exhibit understanding of theory of mind. I think it’s more likely that the user I replied to is projecting their own biases and beliefs onto the LLM.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Basically, just about any ToM test has larger and more advanced LLMs attaining humanlike performance on it. Which was a surprising finding at the time. It gets less surprising the more you think about it. This extends even to novel and unseen tests - so it's not like they could have memorized all of them. Base models perform worse, and with a more jagged capability profile. Some tests are easier to get a base model to perform well on - it's likely that they map better onto what a base model already does internally for the purposes of text prediction. Some are a poor fit, and base models fail much more often. Of course, there are researchers arguing that it's not "real theory of mind", and the surprisingly good performance must have come from some kind of statistical pattern matching capabilities that totally aren't the same type of thing as what the "real theory of mind" does, and that designing one more test where LLMs underperform humans by 12% instead of the 3% on a more common test will totally prove that. But that, to me, reads like cope.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      There are several papers studying this, but the situation is far more nuanced than you’re implying. Here’s one paper stating that these capabilities are an illusion: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3610978.3640767 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3610978.3640767
dist-epoch 1y ago
> You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right. Of course they can, just like a psychiatrist can.

ivape 1y ago

More information: Use the LLM more until you are convinced. If you are not convinced, use it more. Use it more in absurd ways until you are convinced. Repeat the above until you are convinced.

piva00 1y ago
Is this satire? Really hard to tell in this year of 2025...
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Yeah, Poe's Law hitting hard here.
emp17344 1y ago
You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. Can you provide a specific example of AI “blowing your mind”?
- reaperducer 1y ago
  You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. So he's not just an LLM evangelist, he also writes like one.

tbrownaw 1y ago

Well there was that example a while back of some store's product recommendation algo inferring that someone was pregnant before any of the involved humans knew.

Gerardo1 1y ago
That's...not hard. Pregnancy produces a whole slew of relatively predictable behavior changes. The whole point of recommendation systems is to aggregate data points across services.
shakadak 1y ago
The ~woman~ teenager knew she was pregnant, Target's algorithm noticed her change in behavior and spilled the beans to her father.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Back in 2012, mind you.
y0eswddl 1y ago
That wasn't LLMs, that's the incredibly vast amounts of personal data that companies collect on us and correlate to other shoppers' habits. There was nothing involved like what we refer to as "AI" today.

ACCount37 1y ago

LLMs can have surprisingly strong "theory of mind", even at base model level. They have to learn that to get good at predicting all the various people that show up in conversation logs. You'd be surprised at just how much data you can pry out of an LLM that was merely exposed to a single long conversation with a given user. Chatbot LLMs aren't trained to expose all of those latent insights, but they can still do some of it occasionally. This can look like mind reading, at times. In practice, the LLM is just good at dredging the text for all the subtext and the unsaid implications. Some users are fairly predictable and easy to impress.

emp17344 1y ago
Do you have evidence to support any of this? This is the first time I’ve heard that LLMs exhibit understanding of theory of mind. I think it’s more likely that the user I replied to is projecting their own biases and beliefs onto the LLM.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Basically, just about any ToM test has larger and more advanced LLMs attaining humanlike performance on it. Which was a surprising finding at the time. It gets less surprising the more you think about it. This extends even to novel and unseen tests - so it's not like they could have memorized all of them. Base models perform worse, and with a more jagged capability profile. Some tests are easier to get a base model to perform well on - it's likely that they map better onto what a base model already does internally for the purposes of text prediction. Some are a poor fit, and base models fail much more often. Of course, there are researchers arguing that it's not "real theory of mind", and the surprisingly good performance must have come from some kind of statistical pattern matching capabilities that totally aren't the same type of thing as what the "real theory of mind" does, and that designing one more test where LLMs underperform humans by 12% instead of the 3% on a more common test will totally prove that. But that, to me, reads like cope.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    There are several papers studying this, but the situation is far more nuanced than you’re implying. Here’s one paper stating that these capabilities are an illusion: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3610978.3640767 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3610978.3640767

dist-epoch 1y ago

> You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right. Of course they can, just like a psychiatrist can.