4 ms·

If I ask my buddy for help, I don't cross reference everything he says either even though he could just as easily be wrong. A lot of what I'm talking about is

If I ask my buddy for help, I don't cross reference everything he says either even though he could just as easily be wrong. A lot of what I'm talking about is every day stuff not nuclear physics. LLMs are not even close to that unreliable.

fzeroracer 4mo ago
If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you. If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.
- wvenable 4mo ago
  My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house. I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.
  - hodder 4mo ago
    Spot on analogy.
  - fzeroracer 4mo ago
    And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house. So did you build a house, or did you build a house?
    - wvenable 4mo ago
      How can I argue about such a hypothetical?!? If I ask an LLM or my mother-in-law about how to get wine out of the carpet, and I get wine out of the carpet, maybe I have done it wrong and my house will burn down! Who knows?! Your argument is meaningless; there's nothing anyone can say to that.
      - fzeroracer 4mo ago
        And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it? When you ask 'who knows' that's the point of research which was my original comment here. The same goes true for some random asshole telling you to drink bleach as it does an LLM, except people seemingly have hyped themselves into believing the LLM is more right somehow instead of being trained on every random asshole ever.
        wvenable 4mo ago
        > And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it? But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can. It's not perfect and I don't expect it to be perfect. According to my personal experience it's definitely good enough for a lot of things like recipes, coding, hobby stuff, and home repairs. You're expecting me not to trust my own personal learned experience using AI as if somehow all my continued successes are worth nothing because you can invent some wild hypothetical. The more I use it, the more I understand its limitations and avoid them.
        fzeroracer 4mo ago
        > But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can. No, no, no and no. This is the biggest mistake I see people consistently make with LLMs. It is not designed to give you the most accurate answer, it is designed to give you the most likely series of words following your prompt. If an LLM is trained on 10 jackasses thinking bleach is a medicinal drink and 1 doctor who disagrees, it will by virtue of probability tell you to drink bleach. Companies add additional safeguards or system prompts to try and keep it 'on rails' but it's all probability based on what you prompt it. It is by the literal functionality of how it works to do so. A function depending on what said company ingests during training, many of which include the entire corpus of the internet. If you do not understand how LLMs work under the hood then yes, you shouldn't trust your own personal learned experience because you've already demonstrated that you're wrong.
  - cryo32 4mo ago
    You probably just built a shanty town according to a professional.
    - wvenable 4mo ago
      What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?
      - cryo32 4mo ago
        Yes. You could not do it. Doing stuff isn’t essential. Especially when you have no idea what you are doing.
        wvenable 4mo ago
        So never learn anything? Be entirely beholden to other people for everything? People who somehow themselves also have complete knowledge? I've done so many things myself now and that has given me the confidence to do even more. If I had to have a complete idea of what I was doing to do it, I wouldn't even have a job. Doing stuff and making mistakes is exactly how you learn.
        wvenable 4mo ago
        I think you might have reached a nonsensical level of AI contrarianism when it leads you to the statement "doing stuff isn't essential"

fzeroracer 4mo ago

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you. If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

wvenable 4mo ago
My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house. I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.
- hodder 4mo ago
  Spot on analogy.
- fzeroracer 4mo ago
  And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house. So did you build a house, or did you build a house?
  - wvenable 4mo ago
    How can I argue about such a hypothetical?!? If I ask an LLM or my mother-in-law about how to get wine out of the carpet, and I get wine out of the carpet, maybe I have done it wrong and my house will burn down! Who knows?! Your argument is meaningless; there's nothing anyone can say to that.
    - fzeroracer 4mo ago
      And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it? When you ask 'who knows' that's the point of research which was my original comment here. The same goes true for some random asshole telling you to drink bleach as it does an LLM, except people seemingly have hyped themselves into believing the LLM is more right somehow instead of being trained on every random asshole ever.
      - wvenable 4mo ago
        > And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it? But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can. It's not perfect and I don't expect it to be perfect. According to my personal experience it's definitely good enough for a lot of things like recipes, coding, hobby stuff, and home repairs. You're expecting me not to trust my own personal learned experience using AI as if somehow all my continued successes are worth nothing because you can invent some wild hypothetical. The more I use it, the more I understand its limitations and avoid them.
        fzeroracer 4mo ago
        > But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can. No, no, no and no. This is the biggest mistake I see people consistently make with LLMs. It is not designed to give you the most accurate answer, it is designed to give you the most likely series of words following your prompt. If an LLM is trained on 10 jackasses thinking bleach is a medicinal drink and 1 doctor who disagrees, it will by virtue of probability tell you to drink bleach. Companies add additional safeguards or system prompts to try and keep it 'on rails' but it's all probability based on what you prompt it. It is by the literal functionality of how it works to do so. A function depending on what said company ingests during training, many of which include the entire corpus of the internet. If you do not understand how LLMs work under the hood then yes, you shouldn't trust your own personal learned experience because you've already demonstrated that you're wrong.
- cryo32 4mo ago
  You probably just built a shanty town according to a professional.
  - wvenable 4mo ago
    What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?
    - cryo32 4mo ago
      Yes. You could not do it. Doing stuff isn’t essential. Especially when you have no idea what you are doing.
      - wvenable 4mo ago
        So never learn anything? Be entirely beholden to other people for everything? People who somehow themselves also have complete knowledge? I've done so many things myself now and that has given me the confidence to do even more. If I had to have a complete idea of what I was doing to do it, I wouldn't even have a job. Doing stuff and making mistakes is exactly how you learn.
      - wvenable 4mo ago
        I think you might have reached a nonsensical level of AI contrarianism when it leads you to the statement "doing stuff isn't essential"