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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

theatlantic.com

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Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#161

Post by s900mhz »

duxup wrote: post #141
kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

I personally love LLMs and use them daily for a variety of tasks. I really do not know how to “fix” the terminology. I agree with you that they are not thinking in the abstract like humans. I also do not know what else you would call “chain-of-thought”.

Perhaps “journaling-before-answering” lol. It’s basically talking out loud to itself. (Is that still being too anthropomorphic?)

Is this comment me “thinking out loud”? shrug

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#162

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #40
dwaltrip wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.

One thing these models are extremely good at is reading large amounts of text quickly and summarizing important points. That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.

> and summarizing important points

Unfortunately the LLM does not (and cannot) know what points are important or not.

If you just want a text summary based on statistical methods, then go ahead, LLMs do this cheaper and better than the previous generation of tools.

If you want actual "importance" then no.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#163

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

stuckinhell wrote: post #160
beardedwizard wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple recently published a paper that seems to disagree and plainly states it's just pattern matching along with tests to prove it. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...

I'm having a hard time taking apple seriously, when they have don't even have a great llm. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-anthropic-ceo-ai-i... Anthropic CEO: “We Do Not Understand How Our Own AI Creations Work”. I'm going to lean with Anthropic on this one.

> I have a hard time taking your claim about rotten eggs seriously when you're not even a chicken.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#164

Post by happy_dog1 »

megaloblasto wrote: post #119
simonw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious to understand more about this. Right now there are top tier LLMs being produced by a bunch of different organizations: OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Meta and DeepSeek and Qwen and Mistral and xAI and several others as well. Are they all employing separate armies of labelers? Are they ripping off each other's output to avoid that expense? Or is there some other, less labor intensive mechanisms…

I'm also very interested in this. I wasn't aware of the extent of the effort of labelers. If someone could point me to an article or something where I could learn more that would be greatly appreciated.

I added a reply to the parent of your comment with a link to an article I found fascinating about the strange world of labeling and RLHF -- this really interesting article from The Verge 2 years ago:

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#165

Post by tim333 »

yahoozoo wrote: post #124

Why do these same books coming out of AI (Empire of AI, The AI Con) keep getting referenced in all of these articles? It seems like some kind of marketing campaign.

I guess if you an english literature grad type the normal way to approach a subject is to look at the leading books in that area.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#166

Post by streb-lo »

carlosjobim wrote: post #134
mettamage wrote: post #5

> Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—“ChatGPT Jesus,” as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others a…

We were warned: “You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the LORD your God." A computer chip is a stone (silicon) which has been engraved. It's a graven image. Anything man-made is always unworthy of worship. That includes computer programs such as AI. That includes man-made ideas such as "the government", a…

I mean, the bible is a man made pile of crap too...

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#167

Post by cma »

jhedwards wrote: post #156
AlecSchueler wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"

Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).

> which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).

Its possible something like this could be said of the middle transformer layers where it gets more and more abstract, and modern models are multimodal as well through various techniques.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#168

Post by thomastjeffery »

clejack wrote: post #106

Are people still experiencing llms getting stuck in knowledge and comprehension loops? I used them but not excessively, and I'm not heavily tracking their performance either. For example, if you ask an llm a question, and it produces a hallucination then you try to correct it or explain to it that it is incorrect; and it produces a near identical hallucination while implying that it has produced a new, correct result…

That's the difference between bias and logic. A statistical model is applied bias, just like computation is applied logic/arithmetic. Once you realize that, it's pretty easy to understand the potential strengths and limitations of a model.

Both approaches are missing a critical piece: objectivity. They work directly with the data, and not about the data.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#169

Post by cwillu »

jenadine wrote: post #44
andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

> produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another What does "thinking" even mean? It turns out that some intelligence can emerge from this stochastic process. LLM can do math and can play chess despite not trained for it. Is that not thinking? Also, could it be possible that are our brains do the same: generating muscle output or spoken…

I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but “LLM can play chess” is overstating things, and “despite not being trained for it” is understating how many chess games and books would be in the training set of any LLM.

While it's been a few months since I've tested, the last time I tested the reasoning on a game for which very little data is available in book or online text, I was rather underwhelmed with openai's performance.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#170

Post by throwawaymaths »

andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

yeah, i think you dont understand either. rlhf is no where near the volume of "pure" data that gets thrown into the pot of data.
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