161–170 of 308 posts
But it rectified itself.
The same thing happened when Internet arrived. "Don't believe anything you read on the Internet."
I guess the reaction was same when printed media arrived.
But the thing is, things get better over time.
LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as…
At the moment, I find them to be the perfect tool to get started with learning about something. I don't expect it to tell me everything I need to know or to even be right, but if I ask ChatGPT or another LLM a question about a subject I'm not familiar with then it will at least use a bunch of terminology that I didn't have in my vocabulary before starting. For example, I just bought a 1990 Miata and I want to install…
LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as…
I think it's ok. When wikipedia arrived, everyone was up in arms that people are learning from something that's open for anyone to edit. But it rectified itself. The same thing happened when Internet arrived. "Don't believe anything you read on the Internet." I guess the reaction was same when printed media arrived. But the thing is, things get better over time.
8 months or so ago, my quip regarding LLMs was “stochastic parrot.” The term I’ve been using of late is “authority simulator.” My formative experiences with “authority figures” was a person who can speak with breadth and depth about a subject and who seems to have internalized it because they can answer quickly and thoroughly. Because LLMs do this so well, it’s really easy to feel like you’re talking to an authority…
I guess soon we'll hear them called weapons of mass epistemic destruction.
I used to get this same feeling during lectures in uni. Often the information was presented well and, along with some clear examples, everything seemed to make perfect sense. It wasn't until working through practice problems later, on my own, did it become clear how much detail I was missing.
been thinking about this for a while - how will society progress when everyone has their own version of "yes man" confirming everything they think of?
The LLM folks (the hare) will get the initial upper hand as it appears as though they are moving far faster than others but with limited or wrong actual results. This could change if we can solve the hallucination issue. Yes, they are in personal echo chambers but that can only get you so far when you hit the real world. It will be painful and messy but it will resolve long term. Worse case we end up with a Dune "do not make machines that think like a person".
The slow group (tortoise) are those that do not actively engadge in these things. Yes, this trying to keep up but using much slower mental faculties. I suspect long term they will do better as the fast group fail to deliver. Again if we do not solve issues of LLMs which is not certain.
So long as there is still the slow group, we probably would not go down the dark path of individual echo chambers. Long term, eventually if you trip over the same mental stumbling block, you learn to not do that any more.
Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…
Sure, but now the established power users are free to insert more subtle attacks. The https://xkcd.com/978/ problem never stopped and the "reliable sources" consideration process allows for considerable political bias.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This captures my experience quite well. I can "get a lot more done," but it's not really me doing the things, and I feel like a bit of a fraud. And as the workday and the workweek roll on, I find myself needing to force myself to look things up and experiment rather than just asking the LLM. It's quite clear that for most people LLMs will make the more dependent. People with better discipline I think will really bene…
>it's not really me doing the things, and I feel like a bit of a fraud I've been thinking about this a bit. We don't really think this way in other areas, is it appropriate to think this way here? My car has an automatic transmission, am I a fraud because the machine is shifting gears for me? My tractor plows a field, am I a fraud because I'm not using draft horses or digging manually? Spell check caught a word, am I…
As a software developer, your job is to understand code and business constraints so you can solve problems the way most appropriate for the situation. If you aren't actually keeping up with those constraints as they change through time, you're not doing your job. And yeah, that's a kind of fraud. Maybe it's more on yourself than your employer most of the time, but... It's your job. If you don't want to do it, maybe it's more respectful of your own time, energy, and humanity to move on.
I used to get this same feeling during lectures in uni. Often the information was presented well and, along with some clear examples, everything seemed to make perfect sense. It wasn't until working through practice problems later, on my own, did it become clear how much detail I was missing.
Now consider what's happening to the learning process of the (rather large) subset of current college students choosing to replace that struggle for detailed understanding with LLM queries.