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The AI bullshit singularity

successfulsoftware.net

141–150 of 187 posts

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#141
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans train on self-generated data all the time, but compared to today's LLMs, humans have superior reasoning ability, which enables them to separate good from bad data. Humans can confirm many things for themselves if need be and our social hierarchies crystallize authority figures which perform curation for others. On top of that humans have a lifetime of experience with the real world, while LLMs rely only on rep…

This view of people seems… idealistic, given the number of people who uncritically look to Facebook or Reddit for information (and then happily parrot whatever memes they find) and the number of LLMs that do the same. I think people are substantially worse at figuring out what is “good” data, and I think a huge number of people are/are starting to nominate LLMs as those “authority figures”. And, given that, I think t…

> a huge number of people are starting to nominate LLMs as those "authority figures"

When LLMs started to go mainstream I said I was not afraid of AI, but was afraid of (unwise) people with AI. This phenomenon is what I foresaw.

The worst thinkers are the ones most hungry to outsource their decision making.

The fact that LLM output requires good judgement by the recipient to filter the wheat from the chaff, and those with poor judgement skills are most likely to lean on decision tools makes for a potentially volatile situation.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it seems that with a fixed amount of hardware or operations there is some sort of efficient frontier across all the axes (speed, generalization, capacity, whatever), so there should logically be a point with diminishing returns and a maximum performance. Like there is only so much you can do with a single punch card.

Yes, there are physical limits but they are so far off from human pov that they don't matter much. For example information communication rate that humans can perform (read or write) compared to what computers can do. Same with information storage, retrieval, precision, computation rate etc.

Sure computes have lots of transistors, but brains have 10s of billions of neurons and only use 12W of power.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#143
post #12

There is quite a lot of bullshit in human generated content on the internet.

Exactly. Why do we hold AI to higher standards than ourselves?

For one thing, we use AI to generate answers or outputs we want to rely on. If I use human sources I pick sources I trust. I frequently use multiple sources and check citations.

If I still need to do that with "AI", what purpose does it serve?

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#144

As AI advances, there will be AI and algorithms that will check LLMs and their output, sort of LLMs' verifier. It is foolish to think that LLMs won't improve to the point where there are almost no or very low hallucinations and false information. We are just at the beginning of LLMs and generative AI.

How do you automatically verify that an LLM isn't hallucinating?

Idk, ask LLMs researchers....they will figure it out sooner or later.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#146
post #2

I broadly agree with that. Repeated training with self-generated data is the technological equivalent of incest and can lead to nothing good.

Inbreeding certainly didn't go well for the Habsbergs.

Didn't think that would be a controversial topic!

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#147
post #48
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch human behavior long enough and you'll also realize that encoding of social behaviors in our society does a lot of heavy lifting for our brains so we don't have to think. Also, for bonus points define intelligence in a manner that describes simple systems with rudimentary intelligence up to complex systems with higher levels of intelligence than a human. Can you do it, because as of so far no one else has.

Do you have any links to philosophical attempts at this definition? It feels like it would be a ripe field.

There is quite a bit of different information, but when any groups cross reference each others work on differences you end up with lines like this

"There is no agreed-upon definition of the concept of intelligence neither in psychology nor in philosophy. Experts’ definitions differ widely."

Intelligence itself seems to be a bunch of different behaviors and abilities that when combined have emergent behaviors that are difficult to predict and reduce to simple systems.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#148
post #73
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya anyone that tells you crypto solves the problems of bad actors is delusional or pawning a bill of goods.

No, you can filter bullshit by trusted public keys. This isn’t a new problem. It just now needs to go mainstream.

"Sorry everyone, my private key got leaked and I had to revoke it, use this public key instead, also buy this crypto" --Really, really Elon Musk

Cryptography and human behavior are incompatible.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#149
post #102

This article is bullshit. It's on the first page only because it talks about a very widespread fear, namely that LLMs might actually become dumber because they are trained on their own output . In reality, LLMs are already trained on the output of other LLMs , as specific and well-directed training is much more effective than a disorderly ingestion of text produced by illiterate internet users. Let's not forget the d…

>In reality, LLMs are already trained on the output of other LLMs That's a fact, but are there any studies on training a LLM on it's own output and not the output of a different LLM ? For instance, chatgpt gets knowledge updates so I understand it must be retrained somehow. What happens if the retraining data contains large patches of its own output ? Has this scenario been explored ?

Datasets are a dark subject because they contain illegal material.

Most gpts, including chatGPT, are trained on the chatGPT outputs.

Plus, a lot of chatGPT training material is hand picked by humans.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#150
post #148
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can filter bullshit by trusted public keys. This isn’t a new problem. It just now needs to go mainstream.

"Sorry everyone, my private key got leaked and I had to revoke it, use this public key instead, also buy this crypto" --Really, really Elon Musk Cryptography and human behavior are incompatible.

I mean if you think about it for 5 minutes sure. But look at what bluesky is doing for example around decentralized moderation. It’s not really been an important problem in the global sense to get cryptographic attestations by neural parties for asserting what they have witnessed or analyzed for evidence of falsehoods
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