141–150 of 652 posts
Text is scaled to 300% to indicate just how important and authoritative they think their opinion is.
And it talks down to you in a "here comes the expert" style, with an atrocious aimed-at-preschoolers presentation.
No thank you.
Somebody made a website to express their opinion - wherein their opinion can be surmised by reading the domain name. Text is scaled to 300% to indicate just how important and authoritative they think their opinion is. And it talks down to you in a "here comes the expert" style, with an atrocious aimed-at-preschoolers presentation. No thank you.
Some people do like big bullet list of points.
Some people need to be spoon fed.
Don't blame the spoon for being a spoon.
To be clear, neither possesses any magical "woo" outside of physics that gives one or the other some secret magical properties - but these are not arbitrary meaningless distinctions in the way they are often discussed.
Somebody made a website to express their opinion - wherein their opinion can be surmised by reading the domain name. Text is scaled to 300% to indicate just how important and authoritative they think their opinion is. And it talks down to you in a "here comes the expert" style, with an atrocious aimed-at-preschoolers presentation. No thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no models of reality involved. It literally has a mathematical model that maps what would, colloquially at least, be known as reality. What exactly do you think those math pipelines represent? They're not arbitrary numbers; they are generated from actual data that is generated by reality. There's no anthropomorphizing at all.
reality is infinite. a corpus of training data from the internet is finite. any finite number divided by infinity ends up tending towards zero. so, mathematically at least, the training data is not a sufficient sample of reality because the proportion of reality being sampled is basically always zero! fun with maths ;) > What exactly do you think those math pipelines represent? probability distributions of human lang…
Since LLMs are directly based on that language, they are definitely based on and are a model of reality. Are they perfect? No. Are they limited? Yes. Are they "bullshit"? Only to someone who is judging emotionally.
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,…
The costs are a problem. We don't have hard evidence that this will be solved, but with algorithmic efficiency and raw compute costs both changing rapidly, the cost per token has gone down by about a factor of 10 per year for the last 3 years, i.e. 1000x over 3 years.
1. These companies are heavily subsidized by huge amounts of venture investment
2. If I'm integrating this technology into my web product there's absolutely no way I'll be adding a 3rd party company as a dependency. This is all way too new and bubbly to trust any of the current offerings will still exist in O(years).
Are there any similar studies showing not sticker price but actual compute/performance decrease?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For example, you could read something on Statista.com, you could see the credits of that dataset, and visit the source to verify. Or you randomly encounter some quote and then visit your favourite Snopes-like website to verify that the person actually said that.
That's what's under attack. The "middleware" will still be there, but the source is going to be out of your reach. Hallucinations are not a bug, but a feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they define the term bullshit in lesson 2: [quote]BULLSHIT involves language or other forms of communication intended to appear authoritative or persuasive without regard to its actual truth or logical consistency.[/quote]
That is an emotionally manipulative definition and anthropomorphizes the LLMs. They don't "intend" anything, they're not trying to trick you, or sound persuasive.
"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…
The more important point is, they aren't trained on only factual (or statistically certain) statements. That's the ground truth that's missing. It's easy to feed an LLM a bunch of text scraped from the internet. It's much harder to teach it how to separate fact from fiction. Even the best human minds that live or ever have lived have not been able to do that flawlessly. We've created machines that have a larger amount of memory than any human, much quicker recall, the ability to converse with vast numbers of people at once, but it performs at about par with humans in discerning fact from fiction.
That's my biggest concern about creating super powered artificial intelligence. It's super powers are only super in a couple dimensions and people mistake that for general intelligence. I came across someone online that really believed chatGPT was creating a custom diet plan tailored to their specific health needs, base on a few prompts. That is scary!