I’ll add my own questionable analogy:
Physicians were (one of the) first LLMs (in terms of functionality).
Their job is to handle common cases, and have broad enough knowledge to point you in the right direction as needed
An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
181–190 of 365 posts
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're at such a strange point where even school children knows that something like Wikipedia isn't necessarily factually correct and that you need to double check. They then go and ask ChatGPT, as if it wasn't trained on Wikipedia. We haven't reached the stage yet where the majority of people are as sceptical of chatbots as they are of Wikipedia. I get that even if people know not to trust a wiki, they might anyway,…
To be fair, most people aren’t even critical of Wikipedia. They read an article, consume its content, and believe themselves competent experts without digging into the sources, the papers, or the talk pages for discourse and dissent. Giving LLMs credibility as “lossless encyclopedias” is tacit approval of further dumbing-down of humanity through answer engines instead of building critical thinking skills.
No, I agree that most people aren't critical (critical enough) of Wikipedia. My point is that many of them know that they should be.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the user will at least need to know something about the topic beforehand. I used ChatGPT 5 over the weekend to double check dosing guidelines for a specific medication. "Provide dosage guidelines for medication [insert here]" It spit back dosing guidelines that were an order of magnitude wrong (suggested 100mcg instead of 1mg). When I saw 100mcg, I was suspicious and said "I don't think that's right" and it quickly…
I find if I force thinking mode and then force it to search the web it’s much better.
Agree, I usually force thinking mode too. I actually like the "Thinking mini" option that was just released recently, good middle ground between getting an instant answer and waiting 1-2 minutes.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#184Less than 1% of an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia.
The other 99+% is all of the lossy knowledge that isn't even in encyclopedias in the first place.
Including going much, much, much deeper than e.g. Wikipedia in many areas. So there it's not "lossy" -- it's effectively the opposite, i.e. "super resolution".
And very, very little of what I look up using LLM's is anywhere in Wikipedia to begin with.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#185I totally agree with the author. Sadly, I feel like that's not what the majority of LLM users tend to view LLMs. And it's definitely not what AI companies marketing. > The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters the problem is that in order to develop an intuition for questions that LLMs can answer, the user will…
>the problem is that in order to develop an intuition for questions that LLMs can answer, the user will at least need to know something about the topic beforehand. I believe that this lack of initial understanding of the user input
I think there's a parallel here for the internet as an i formation source. It delivered on "unlimited knowledge at the tip of everyone's fingertips" but lowering the bar also lowered the bar.
That access "works" only when the user is capable of doing their part too. Evaluating sources, integrating knowledge. Validating. Cross examining.
Now we are just more used to recognizing that accessibility comes with its own problem.
Some of this is down to general education. Some to domain expertize. Personality plays a big part.
The biggest factor is, i think, intelligence. There's a lot of 2nd and 3rd order thinking required to simultaneously entertain a curiosity, consider of how the LLM works, and exercise different levels of skepticism depending on the types of errors LLMs are likely to make.
Using LLMs correctly and incorrectly is.. subtle.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Deterministic" is overrated. Computers are deterministic. Most of the time. If you really don't think about all the times they aren't. But if you leave the CPU-land and go out into the real world, you don't have the privilege of working with deterministic systems at all. Engineering with LLMs is closer to "designing a robust industrial process that's going to be performed by unskilled minimum wage workers" than it i…
And one major issue is that LLMs are largely being sold and understood more like reliable algorithms than what they really are. If everyone understood the distinction and their limitations, they wouldn’t be enjoying this level of hype, or leading to teen suicides and people giving themselves centuries-old psychiatric illnesses. If you “go out into the real world” you learn people do not understand LLMs aren’t determi…
It's nothing new. LLMs are unreliable, but in the same ways humans are.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#187I think that the natural language understanding capability of current LLMs is undervalued. To understand what the user meant before LLM's we had to train several NLP+ML models in order to get something going but in my experience we'll never get close to what LLM's do now. I remember the first time I tried ChatGPT and I was surprised by how well it understood every input.
It's parsing. It's tokenizing. But it's a stretch to call it understanding. It creates a pattern that it can use to compose a response. Ensuring the response is factual is not fundamental to LLM algorithms. In other words, it's not thinking. The fact that it can simulate a conversation between thinking humans without thinking is remarkable. It should tell us something about the facility for language. But it's not und…
I know that the "understanding" is a stretch, but I refer to the Understanding of the NLU that wasn't really understanding either.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the user will at least need to know something about the topic beforehand. I used ChatGPT 5 over the weekend to double check dosing guidelines for a specific medication. "Provide dosage guidelines for medication [insert here]" It spit back dosing guidelines that were an order of magnitude wrong (suggested 100mcg instead of 1mg). When I saw 100mcg, I was suspicious and said "I don't think that's right" and it quickly…
Using a LLM for medical research is just as dangerous as Googling it. Always ask your doctors!
I don’t disagree that you should use your doctor as your primary source for medical decision making, but I also think this is kind of an unrealistic take. I should also say that I’m not an AI hype bro. I think we’re a long ways off from true functional AGI and robot doctors.
I have good insurance and have a primary care doctor with whom I have good rapport. But I can’t talk to her every time I have a medical question—it can take weeks to just get a phone call! If I manage to get an appointment, it’s a 15 minute slot, and I have to try to remember all of the relevant info as we speed through possible diagnoses.
Using an llm not for diagnosis but to shape my knowledge means that my questions are better and more pointed, and I have a baseline understanding of the terminology. They’ll steer you wrong on the fine points, but they’ll also steer you _right_ on the general stuff in a way that Dr. Google doesn’t.
One other anecdote. My daughter went to the ER earlier this year with some concerning symptoms. The first panel of doctors dismissed it as normal childhood stuff and sent her home. It took 24 hours, a second visit, and an ambulance ride to a children’s hospital to get to the real cause. Meanwhile, I gave a comprehensive description of her symptoms and history to an llm to try to get a handle on what I should be asking the doctors, and it gave me some possible diagnoses—including a very rare one that turned out to be the cause. (Kid is doing great now). I’m still gonna take my kids to the doctor when they’re sick, of course, but I’m also going to use whatever tools I can to get a better sense of how to manage our health and how to interact with the medical system.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're saying hammers shouldn't be squishy. No, that is not what I’m saying. My point is closer to “the words chosen to describe the made up concept do not translate to the idea being conveyed”. I tried to make that fit into your idea of the banana and squishy hammer, but now we’re several levels of abstraction deep using analogies to discuss analogies so it’s getting complicated to communicate clearly. > Simon is…
This is the type of comment that has been killing HN lately. “I agree with you but I want to disagree because I’m generally just that type of person. Also I am unable to tell my disagreeing point adds nothing.”
Except that’s not what I’m saying at all. If anything, the “type of comment that has been killing HN” (and any community) are those who misunderstand and criticise what someone else says without providing any insight while engaging in ad hominem attacks (which are explicitly against the HN guidelines). It is profoundly ironic you are actively attacking others for the exact behaviour you are engaging in. I will kindly ask you do not do that. You are the first person in this immediate thread being rude and not adding to the collective understanding of the argument.
We are all free to agree with one part of an argument while disagreeing with another. That’s what healthy discourse is, life is not black and white. As way of example, if one says “apples are tasty because they are red”, it is perfectly congruent to agree apples are tasty but disagree that their colour is the reason. And by doing so we engage in a conversation to correct a misconception.
Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how you spot hype nonsense - claims that anything is analogous to human intelligence. Even absent all other objections, we don't understand the human mind well enough to make a claim like that.
You don't need to understand the human mind on a mechanistic level. You only need to examine how the whole organism learns, acts, and reacts to stimulus and situation. Even something as simple as catching a ball is basically predictive. You predict where the ball will be along its arc when it reaches a point in space where you can catch it. Then, strictly informed by that prediction, you solve a problem of motion thr…
> The major component of what we call intelligence is purely predictive
Then what is creativity? Creativity is not predictive and is the most important part of human intelligence, since it isn't about figuring out if a situation leads to good things, its about finding a new kind of situation that leads to good things.
Don't say "we do totally random things and try to predict those outcomes", there is nothing supporting that since we have tried that with computers and that doesn't result in creativity anything like humans, we don't know how human creativity works.