251–260 of 652 posts
You can thrive just fine by entirely ignoring it and all the snake oil vendors living in it.
4 years and all they have to show for it is absurdly powerful video cards, sub 90% accuracy where it matters, and the only application is "chat bot."
It's a fad. Wake up everyone.
Yes, but so is the average person. Do you cover the similarities/parallels to common human behavior patterns in your course? It stands out to me as a major blind spot in a lot of the discourse about LLMs, down to willing acceptance of humans intuiting what someone else meant when the words themselves were fundamentally ambiguous, which is extremely akin to a hallucination chosen from the listener's language model.
I wish the title wasn't so aggressively anti-tech though. The problem is that I would like to push this course at work, but doing so would be suicidal in career terms because I would be seen as negative and disruptive. So the good message here is likely to miss the mark where it may be most needed.
I wish the title wasn't so aggressively anti-tech though. The problem is that I would like to push this course at work, but doing so would be suicidal in career terms because I would be seen as negative and disruptive. So the good message here is likely to miss the mark where it may be most needed.
Really? I am curious how this could be disruptive in any meaningful sense. Whose feelings could possibly be hurt? It just feels like it would be getting offended from a course on libraries because the course talks about how sometimes the book is checked out.
> Large language models are both powerful tools, and mindless—even dangerous—bullshit machines. Yes, but so is the average person. Do you cover the similarities/parallels to common human behavior patterns in your course? It stands out to me as a major blind spot in a lot of the discourse about LLMs, down to willing acceptance of humans intuiting what someone else meant when the words themselves were fundamentally amb…
> But the LLM can’t tell us. It’s not a person. It doesn’t have the metacognitive abilities necessary to reflect on its past actions and report the motivations underlying them*.
> With no clue why it did whatever it just did, the LLM is forced to guess wildly at a plausible explanation, like the ill-fated Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan's film Memento.
> And we, gullible humans that we are, often believe its bullshit.
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I am almost convinced that we ourselves are a narrator riding along inside an animal's mind, trying desperately to put together explanations for our actions, mostly just to convince others, just as though an LLM were running on our own senses trying to portray some deep semblance of consciousness. I don't think we'll find a super smart AI, we'll just realize we were not very sophisticated all along. The power of speech for information and culture transfer, writing, inspiration, and coordination is just awe inspiring, evolutionary speaking, so once we could talk we had to, because the "better" talker almost always won. It's an arms race.
Simply ignore anyone who says this and go about your business.
Doubly so if they bring up the environmental impact of AI.
> We (the authors of this website) have at times sought insight into the inner workings of an LLM by asking it “why did you just do that?” > But the LLM can’t tell us. It’s not a person. It doesn’t have the metacognitive abilities necessary to reflect on its past actions and report the motivations underlying them*. > With no clue why it did whatever it just did, the LLM is forced to guess wildly at a plausible explan…
this means that it really exists in retrospect (20ms ? i recall some neuroscience articles from the 00s). nonetheless its whole reason for existing (retrospectively) is planning the future