Is there a way to download and read this as a document instead of web pages? They're hard to navigate.
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Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#42I think a great number of working professionals need a course like this too. I am already tired of ChatGPT being cited by the less experienced as an invisible expert in the room during technical discussions.
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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#43Great stuff! LLMs, social media, the information landscape has changed so much in the past decade. We need good pedagogical resources on how to think of these tools, both their benefits and their downsides.
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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#44Do you feel that you may be being a bit provocative by calling LLM's 'bullshit machines'? I understand the frustration as I've been bullshitted by these models just as much as the next programmer, but surely with recent advancements in RAG and reasoning, they're not just 'bullshit machines' at this point, are they?
they define the term bullshit in lesson 2:
[quote]BULLSHIT involves language or other forms of communication intended to appear authoritative or persuasive without regard to its actual truth or logical consistency.[/quote]
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#45Fantastic work.
Quick suggestion: a link at the bottom of the page to the next and previous lesson would help with navigation a ton.
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#46There is a bit of very important content missing from the explanation of the autocomplete analogy. The combination of encoding / tokenization of meanings and ideas, related concepts, and mapping these relationships in vector space makes LLMs not so much glorified text prediction engines as browsers/oracles of the sum total of cultural-linguistic knowledge as captured in the training corpus. Understanding how the impl…
It’s also why they can produce such hard to identify bullshit and harmful output. I’ve had some really convincing, yet fundamentally flawed, code output that if I hadn’t done about a million code reviews before I might have just used.
And been totally screwed later.
Near as I can tell, that the bullshit is so much more convincing with them is a huge detriment that society really won’t learn to appreciate until it’s gotten really bad. As I noted in another thread, it allows people to get much further into the ‘fake it until you make it’ hole than they otherwise would.
That 90% of the time it’s fine is what actually makes it all worse.
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#47Do you feel that you may be being a bit provocative by calling LLM's 'bullshit machines'? I understand the frustration as I've been bullshitted by these models just as much as the next programmer, but surely with recent advancements in RAG and reasoning, they're not just 'bullshit machines' at this point, are they?
“Bullshit” actually means something: > In philosophy and psychology of cognition, the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern for truth, clarity, or meaning, distinguishing "bullshit" from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit It’s really an ideal term to describe what LLMs do.
I prefer "waffle" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_(speech)
"Waffle machines" is even kind of funny.
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#48> Moreover, a hallucination is a pathology. It's something that happens when systems are not working properly.
> When an LLM fabricates a falsehood, that is not a malfunction at all. The machine is doing exactly what it has been designed to do: guess, and sound confident while doing it.
> When LLMs get things wrong they aren't hallucinating. They are bullshitting.
Very important distinction and again, shows the marketing bias to make these systems seem different than they are.
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#49This website is so important!
Now ask yourself why AI companies don't want to be regulated or scrutinized.
So many companies (users and providers) jump on the AI hype train because of FOMO. The end result might be just as destructive as this mythical "AGI".
Edit: I am not saying to not use the technology. I am just on the side of caution and constant validation. The technology has to serve society. But I fear this hype (and ideology) has it the other way around. Musk isn't destroying the US government for no reason...
Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
#50> Moreover, a hallucination is a pathology. It's something that happens when systems are not working properly. > When an LLM fabricates a falsehood, that is not a malfunction at all. The machine is doing exactly what it has been designed to do: guess, and sound confident while doing it. > When LLMs get things wrong they aren't hallucinating. They are bullshitting. Very important distinction and again, shows the marke…
LLMs are always bullshitting, even when they get things right, as they simply do not have any concept of truthfulness.