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Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

thebullshitmachines.com

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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#391

Post by hcs »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #253
sgt101 wrote: post #66

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.

> I 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.

If it was called "Are libraries bullshit?" it is easy to imagine defensiveness in response. There's some narrow sense in which "bullshit" is a technical term, but it's still a mild obscenity in many cultures.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#392

Post by quacked »

There seems to be a lot of coping in the anti-AI department about the utility of the current LLMs. "I'm not impressed". You're not impressed that 98% of knowledge workers can 10-100x their own work output for free?

As a very intelligent infrastructure engineer told me: AI isn't going to take your job, but someone using AI is.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#393

Post by rockskon »

maccaw wrote: post #368
globalnode wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give it a read. I must admit, the more I learn about the inner workings of LLM's the more I see them as simply the sum of their parts and nothing more. The rest is just anthropomorphism and marketing.

Funny, I feel the same way about humans.

Whenever I see someone confidently making a comparison between LLMs and people, I assume they are unserious individuals more interested in maintaining hype around technology than they are in actually discussing what it does.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#394

Post by radioactivist »

llm_trw wrote: post #362
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just ruled out 99% of humans from having reasoning capabilities. The beautiful thing about reasoning models is that there is no need to overcomplicate it with all the things you've mentioned, you can literally read the model's reasoning and decide for yourself if it's bullshit or not.

>You just ruled out 99% of humans from having reasoning capabilities. After a conversation with humans I think you'd agree 1% of them being able to reason deeply is a vast overestimation. A good example to see how little people can reason is the following classic: > Given the following premises derive a conclusion about your poems: > 1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. > 2) No modern poe…

I could trace through that example quite quickly and I'm not an expert in logic, so I think you might be exaggerating some statements about difficulty here.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#395

Post by radioactivist »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

I've had frontier reasoning models (or at least what I can access in ChatGPT+ at any given moment) give wildly inconsistent answers when asked to provide the underlying reasoning (and the CoT weren't always given). Inventing sources and then later denying them mentioned them. Backtracking on statements it claimed to be true. Hiding weasel words in the middle of a long complicated argument to arrive at whatever it decided the answer was. So I'm inclined to believe the reasoning steps here are also susceptible to all the issues discussed in the posted article.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#396

Post by joenot443 »

fmbb wrote: post #329
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

Training on all papers does not mean the model believes or knows the truth. It is just a machine that spits out words.

It's 1994. Larry Llyod Mayer has read the entire internet, hundreds of thousands of studies across every field, and can answer queries word for word the same as modern LLMs do. He speaks every major language. He's not perfect, he does occasionally make mistakes, but the sheer breadth of his knowledge makes him among the most employable individuals in America. The Pentagon, IBM, and Deloitte are begging to hire him. Instead, he works for you, for free.

Most laud him for his generosity, but his skeptics describe him as just a machine that spits out words. A stochastic parrot, useless for any real work.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#397

Post by MichaelZuo »

radioactivist wrote: post #395
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

I've had frontier reasoning models (or at least what I can access in ChatGPT+ at any given moment) give wildly inconsistent answers when asked to provide the underlying reasoning (and the CoT weren't always given). Inventing sources and then later denying them mentioned them. Backtracking on statements it claimed to be true. Hiding weasel words in the middle of a long complicated argument to arrive at whatever it dec…

This sounds similar to a median human with little scruples?

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#398

Post by theincredulousk »

reductionist view can be applied to what we call "thinking" and "intelligence" too. When I'm asked a question, my brain is also just picking a suitable sequence of words based on my experience (training). Talking is what we consider part of thinking, something only "intelligent" creatures can do.

Just feels like a lot of coping from people that don't want to let go of our concept of "intelligence superiority" or w/e you want to call it.

The end game of this will be them wild-eyed in front of a string-crossed cork board, claiming they've found the one thing human brains can do that AI can't, so it's not thinking it's just x,y,z.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#399

Post by owenversteeg »

No comments on the course, but the title (in classic HN fashion) - how I survive in a ChatGPT world: it’s simple. I consume as little recent content as possible and I aim for the bulk of that to be “raw” information: various forms of data and the minimum set of news from wire services. Every time I dare stick my head out further I drown in a deluge of generated sewage. Blogs are dead, social media is dead, forums are dead, the media is dead, text is dead, video is dead and photos are dead. The only unpoisoned wells left in the land are old books and the elderly.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#400

Post by ctbergstrom »

raincom wrote: post #301

Since you are on Frankfurtian bullshit, why don't you consider Late G.A. Cohen's take on intellectual bullshit (bullshit perpetuated in the academia), as the latter's notion of bullshit is linked to knowledge, unlike the bullshit we hear from salesmen, showmen, etc.

We've discussed Cohen's work in our book _Calling Bullshit_, but the type of bullshit the Cohen focuses on — unclarifiable unclarity, particularly in academic writing — is not what LLMs produce so it strikes us as far less relevant to this course than Frankfurt's notion.
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