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

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

#121

Post by tmnvdb »

bayindirh wrote: post #117
tmnvdb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Allowing a parrot to iterate on given examples and generate a similar one with the information baked in their weights does not invalidate "Stochastic Parrot" take. On the contrary, it proves it. LLMs are statistical machines. The catch is you feed it hundreds of terabytes of valid information, so it asymptotically generates valid information as a result of this statistical bias. Even yet, they can hallucinate so badl…

It's clearly true that the LLMS are 'stochastic parrots', but for all we know that might be the key to intelligence. It is in itself not a deep observation any more than calling your fellow humans 'microbial meatbags'.

Saying that LLMs are stochastic machines does not establish an upper bound for success.

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

#122

Post by fancyfredbot »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

"The LLMs have no ground truth" claim (around chapter 2) that's core to the "bullshit machines" argument is itself wrong. Of course LLMs have ground truth. What do the authors think here, that the text in training corpus is random ? Hint: it isn't. Real conversations are anything but random. There's a lot of information hidden in "statistical ordering of the words", because the distribution is not arbitrary . Statist…

Statistical truths based on observation of reality is the basis for science. Statistical truth based on the text on the internet is the basis for something else, and I would personally not like to call whatever that is science, or any truths established this way "ground truths".

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

#123

Post by dijksterhuis »

ta8645 wrote: post #77
Freak_NL wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They address this in lesson 2: > According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar knows the truth and is trying to lead us in the opposite direction. > A bullshitter either doesn't know the truth, or doesn't care. They are just trying to be persuasive. Being persuasive (i.e., churn out convincing prose) is how LLMs were designed to be.

> Being persuasive (i.e., churn out convincing prose) is how LLMs were designed to be. No. They were designed to churn out accurate prose that accurately reflects their model of reality. They're just imperfect. You're being cynical and emotional to use the term bullshit. And again, it anthropomorphizes the LLM, it implies agency.

> that accurately reflects their model of reality.

you are also seemingly anthropomorphising the technology by assigning to it some concept of having a “model of reality”.

LLM systems output an inference of the next most likely token, given: the input prompt, the model weights and the previously output token [0].

that is all. no models of reality involved. “it” doesn’t “know” or “model” anything about “reality”. the systems are just a fancy probability maths pipelines.

probably generally best to avoid using the word “they” in these discussions. the english language sucks sometimes. :shrug:

[0]: yes i know it is a bit more complicated than that.

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

#124

Post by fatata123 »

tmnvdb wrote: post #121
bayindirh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing a parrot to iterate on given examples and generate a similar one with the information baked in their weights does not invalidate "Stochastic Parrot" take. On the contrary, it proves it. LLMs are statistical machines. The catch is you feed it hundreds of terabytes of valid information, so it asymptotically generates valid information as a result of this statistical bias. Even yet, they can hallucinate so badl…

It's clearly true that the LLMS are 'stochastic parrots', but for all we know that might be the key to intelligence. It is in itself not a deep observation any more than calling your fellow humans 'microbial meatbags'. Saying that LLMs are stochastic machines does not establish an upper bound for success.

We are not stochastic parrots. Old components of our brain help “ground” our thoughts and allow things like doubt or a gut feeling to develop which means we can question ourselves in ways an LLM cannot.

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

#125

Post by jcgrillo »

The cost of inference seems like a major barrier in making these things work commercially. If you put one in the user facing flow you'll need an extraordinary amount of compute that scales extremely poorly in number of users, given that each query takes O(nm^2) where m is the number of model weights (many) and n is the number of tokens in the query. So it seems clear if each user session implies multiple LLM queries, those user sessions had better be exceptionally valuable. This seems like a completely different business with very different constraints and margins.

The problem is it doesn't seem like the value added is all that great. So how do you justify the ruinous cost? I would like to know more about how people actually intend on using these things profitably than to hear about how they're going to wake up and become "intelligent". Does anyone have any success stories actually using this thing? It's hard to find any discussion of this amidst all the bullshit hype, and it's really the only question--can you make money with this or not? And I don't mean raising billions in venture capital, I mean can you integrate these things profitably and sustainably into a website?

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

#126

Post by input_sh »

einrealist wrote: post #49

This website is so important! Now ask yourself why AI companies don't want to be regulated or scrutinized. So many companies (users and providers) jump on the AI hype train because of FOMO. The end result might be just as destructive as this mythical "AGI". Edit: I am not saying to not use the technology. I am just on the side of caution and constant validation. The technology has to serve society. But I fear this hy…

Fully agree, in recent weeks I've also started to consider LLMs in a wider context, which is to destroy all trust in the web.

The enshittification of search engines, making social media verification meaningless, locking down APIs that used to be public, destroying public datasets, spreading lies about legacy media, the easiness of deploying bots that can sound human in short bursts of text... it's all leading towards making it impossible to verify anything you read online.

The fearmongering around deepfakes from a few years back is coming true, but the scale is even bigger. Turns out, there won't be Web 3.0.

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

#127

Post by magicalhippo »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #107

The format is very interesting. Can you speak to the tech stack behind how you made it ?

I'll agree on interesting, however I found it very difficult to follow.

Reading the landing page, I expected a link to get started. Took me some time to really register the links at the very bottom.

After finding my way into the lectures I got distracted by all the scrolling. Fortunately Reader Mode fixed that. However a few lectures in and I notice there's several videos I've missed...

However since I'm starting to approach the get-off-my-lawn age, I guess I'm not the target audience.

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

#128

Post by JKCalhoun »

einrealist wrote: post #49

This website is so important! Now ask yourself why AI companies don't want to be regulated or scrutinized. So many companies (users and providers) jump on the AI hype train because of FOMO. The end result might be just as destructive as this mythical "AGI". Edit: I am not saying to not use the technology. I am just on the side of caution and constant validation. The technology has to serve society. But I fear this hy…

I generally take issue when "FOMO" is used. Could go with:

FOBBWIIBM - Fear of being blindsided when it, inevitably, becomes mainstream.

Or drop the "fear" altogether:

JOENT - Joy of exploring new territory.

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

#129

Post by JKCalhoun »

input_sh wrote: post #126
einrealist wrote: post #49

This website is so important! Now ask yourself why AI companies don't want to be regulated or scrutinized. So many companies (users and providers) jump on the AI hype train because of FOMO. The end result might be just as destructive as this mythical "AGI". Edit: I am not saying to not use the technology. I am just on the side of caution and constant validation. The technology has to serve society. But I fear this hy…

Fully agree, in recent weeks I've also started to consider LLMs in a wider context, which is to destroy all trust in the web. The enshittification of search engines, making social media verification meaningless, locking down APIs that used to be public, destroying public datasets, spreading lies about legacy media, the easiness of deploying bots that can sound human in short bursts of text... it's all leading towards…

What trust in the web was there still?

For me it went a decade ago or so when ads and SEO sites in Google search became ubiquitous.

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

#130

Post by roland35 »

I like the term "bullshit" over "hallucination". These AI machines have no perceptions, no concept of truth, so indeed they are just spewing out words with no regard for truth.

And unfortunately the cost of spreading bullshit has gone down to almost 0.

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