31–40 of 641 posts
The recent article of Sam Altman described pretty much as a compulsive liar. Would it be any surprise if his most impactful contribution to the world was a machine that compulsively lies?
I get the frustration, but it's reductive to just call LLMs "bullshit machines" as if the models are not improving. The current flagship models are not perfect, but if you use GPT-2 for a few minutes, it's incredible how much the industry has progressed in seven years. It's true that people don't have a good intuitive sense of what the models are good or bad at (see: counting the Rs in "strawberry"), but this is more…
Computer graphics have been improving for decades but the uncanny valley remains undefeated. I don't know why anyone expects a breakthrough in other areas. There's a wall we hit and we don't understand our own consciousness and effectiveness well enough to replicate it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether LLMs can create correct content doesn't matter. We've already seen how they are being used and will be used. Fake content and lies. To drive outrage. To influence elections. To distract from real crimes. To overload everyone so they're too tired to fight or to understand. To weaken the concept that anything's true so that you can say anything. Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of mo…
> Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of money on the way. Guiding principle of the AI industry
Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
I love that it ends with such a positive note, even though it's generally a critical article, at least it's well reasoned and not utterly hyping/dooming something.
Thanks yet again Kyle!
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…
I'm extremely skeptical that all of life evolved intelligence to be closer to truth only for us to digitize intelligence and then have the opposite happen. Makes no sense.
The recent article of Sam Altman described pretty much as a compulsive liar. Would it be any surprise if his most impactful contribution to the world was a machine that compulsively lies?
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…
Is it something we want to emulate?
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things can be true at the same time: The technology has improved, and the technology in its current state still isn't fit for purpose. I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks: sports trivia, fixing recipes, explaining board game rules, etc. It works well like 95% of the time. That's fine for inconsequential things. But you'd have to be deeply irresponsible to accept that…
> the technology in its current state still isn't fit for purpose. This is a broad statement that assumes we agree on the purpose. For my purpose, which is software development, the technology has reached a level that is entirely adequate. Meanwhile, sports trivia represents a stress test of the model's memorized world knowledge. It could work really well if you give the model a tool to look up factual information in…
If the purpose is indeed software development with review, then there's nothing stopping multi-billion dollar companies from putting friction into these sytems to direct users towards where the system is at its strongest.
Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…