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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#121

Post by ben_w »

tvink wrote: post #48
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you verify the models you download also aren't trying to get you to buy stuff?

I guess you.. ask them a bunch of recommendations? I would imagine this would not be incredibly hard to test as a community

Before November 30, 2022 that would have worked, but I think it stopped being reliable sometime between the original ChatGPT and today.

As per dead internet theory, how confident are we that the community which tells us which LLM is safe or unsafe is itself made of real people, and not mostly astroturfing by the owners of LLMs which are biased to promote things for money?

Even DIY testing isn't necessarily enough, deceptive alignment has been shown to be possible as a proof-of-concept for research purposes, and one example of this is date-based: show "good" behaviour before some date, perform some other behaviour after that date.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#122

Post by kortex »

teiferer wrote: post #52
gradus_ad wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee. Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choo…

> Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity The analogy carries further than you intended. If you have never reached addiction stage, then there is no factual productivity enhancement. "But I'm so much less productive if I haven't had my morning coffee" Yeah, because you have an addiction. It sounds worse than it is, if you just don't drink coffee for a few days the headaches will subside. B…

It does objectively improve productivity though, beyond offsetting withdrawal.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#123

Post by navane »

Nevermark wrote: post #112
Klaster_1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.

This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.

Instead, we should let capitalism consolidate all power in the hands of the few, and let them directly and pervasively shape people's understanding of the world.

How would a non profit even be funded? That would just be government with extra steps.

No, capitalism giveth the LLMs and capitlism taketh the sales.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#124

Post by [deleted] »

squidbeak wrote: post #118
Nevermark wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.

> Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. You disagree with national curricula, state broadcasters, publicly funded research and public information campaigns?

[deleted]

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#125

Post by CurleighBraces »

raffraffraff wrote: post #81
CurleighBraces wrote: post #72

I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating. A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs

You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning". I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying…

There's limits to AGENTS.md too, a junior will start to understand the concepts/rationale and design decisions and be able to apply that knowledge to future problems, the LLM will not.

It's way too literally in its thinking.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#126

Post by vishnugupta »

tommica wrote: post #28
vishnugupta wrote: post #9

I can somewhat relate to this in the sense that LLMs help me explore different paths of my thought process. The only way to do this earlier was to actually sit down and write it all out and carefully look for gaps. But now the fast feedback loop of LLMs speeds up this process. At times it even shows some path which I hadn't thought of. Or it firms up a direction which I thought only had vague connection. To take one…

> ...sense that LLMs help me explore different paths of my thought process Are you able to expand on this? I'm really curious to know what you mean by "different paths of though process"

That was a typo, sorry. Meant to write “thought process..”.

Continuing my example…LLM listed out a bunch of reasons such as advanced weapons, organizational structure, etc. I can then explore each of those areas further.

Or when I wanted to understand the raise of regional languages in India. Similar process as before…

My larger point was that LLMs now makes it possible to speed run this research curiosity of mine. This sort of a thing was next to impossible in traditional google/web search world.

Of course we need to fact check and eventually read the actual source.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#128

Post by sublinear »

simianwords wrote: post #90
sublinear wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost entirely agree with you, but the issue is that the information you currently have might not be enough to get the answers you want through pure deduction. So how do you get more information? I think chatbots are a very clumsy way to get information. Conversations tend to be unfocused until you, the human, take an interest in something more specific and pursue it. You're still doing all the work. It's also too…

No I don’t think humans have some magical metaphysical deduction capability that LLMs lack exclusively. I have had conversations and while they don’t have the exact attentiveness of a human, they get pretty close. But what they do have an advantage in is being an expert in almost any field.

Yes, LLMs have been a very expensive philosophy lesson for many investors. Ancient epistemology debates are now front and center for everyone to see. So-called "formal epistemology" is just empiricism in disguise attempting to borrow the credibility of rationalism and failing miserably.

LLMs are Bayesian inference and come with all its baggage. We definitely know brains are way better than that, even of other animals or insects.

Ultimately, there's no point in getting a chatbot to say deceptively expert-like words that are guaranteed by design to be lower quality than the books or blogs it learned from. LLMs are at best a search tool for those sources, and investor attitude now reflects that sanity with their confidence shifting back over to Google's offerings. Agentic AI is also pretty weak since agents are as functionally limited as any traditionally written computer program, but lacking the most crucial property of repeatability.

I find it shocking how many people didn't see this whole thing as a grift from day one. What else was SV going to do during the post-covid economic slump?

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#130

Post by gloomyday »

Nevermark wrote: post #112
Klaster_1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.

This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.

I've heard once that Americans distrust their government and trust their corporations, while Europeans distrust their corporations and trust their government. I honestly think that governments already has a huge role in shaping people's understanding of the world, and that's GREAT on good democratic countries.

What I find really weird is that I am stopping believing in the whole idea of free press, considering how the mainstream media is being bought by oligarchs around the globe. I think this is a good example of the erosion of trust in institutions in general. This won't end well.

Your idea of letting it be run by a non-profit makes me believe that you also don't trust institutions anymore.

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