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

thebullshitmachines.com

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

#191

Post by bayindirh »

tmnvdb wrote: post #177
bayindirh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, this assumption of LLMs might be intelligent lies in the assumption is intelligence is enabled solely by the brain. However, as the science improves, we understand more and more that brain is just part of a much bigger network, and its size or surface roughness might not be the only thing determines the level of intelligence. Also, all living things have processes which allows constant input from their…

> So, a living parrot might be more intelligent than these stochastic parrots. Or the other way around.

I don't think you ever observed a Cuckatoo...

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

#192

Post by JKCalhoun »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #163
JKCalhoun wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> being blindsided when it, inevitably, becomes mainstream. I don't see how this could happen. This is not a limited resource. It's not a real estate opportunity. There is enough AI for everyone to buy when it becomes useful to do so. I think FOMO correctly identifies the irrational effort of many companies to jump in without any idea of what the utility might be in any practical sense.

I was responding to the user side mentioned.

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

#193

Post by tim333 »

roland35 wrote: post #130

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.

I dislike the term bullshit because it's use regarding ChatGPT does not match the dictionary version "stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense".

If your sentence "LLMs output is bullshit" is wrong you may be better off changing the sentence than rewriting the dictionary to fit your sentence.

I mean you can redefine words if you like, like how young people use sick and bad to mean much the opposite of what they did, which is fine as a fashion statement, but in trying to reason about LLMs it muddies the reasoning. Which of course is often why academics do it - see Hobbes, Calvin 1993 https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...

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

#194

Post by tmnvdb »

jcgrillo wrote: post #179
tmnvdb wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real costs are dropping because of real efficiency gains and compute cost reductions. The inference costs are dropping at a similar rate.

[citation needed]

https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/

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

#195

Post by TeMPOraL »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #170
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…

>Of course LLMs have ground truth. It is my understanding that LLMs have no such thing, as empiric truth is weighted. For example, if Newton's laws are in conflict with another fact, the LLM will defer to the fact that it finds more probable in context. It will then require human resources to undo and unfold it's core error, else you receive bewildering and untrue remarks or outputs.

> For example, if Newton's laws are in conflict with another fact, the LLM will defer to the fact that it finds more probable in context.

Which is the correct thing to do. If such a context would be, for example, an explanation of an FTL drive in a science fiction story, both LLMs and humans would be correct to put Newton aside.

LLMs aren't Markov chains, they don't output naive word frequency based predictions. They build a high-dimensional statistical representation of entirety of their training data, from which then completions are sampled. We already know this representation is able to identify and encode ideas as diverse as "odd/even" and "fun" and "formal language" and "golden gate bridge"-like. "Fictional context" vs. "Real-life physics" is a concept they can distinguish too, just like people can.

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

#196

Post by tmnvdb »

shaggie76 wrote: post #185

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all. Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty…

Craving "authenticity" is somewhere very high up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. a luxury. That a lot of people do not care much for it is not a sign of moral failing but of having bigger fish to fry.

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

#197

Post by burch45 »

HPsquared wrote: post #47
anon373839 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Bullshit” actually means something: > In philosophy and psychology of cognition, the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern for truth, clarity, or meaning, distinguishing "bullshit" from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit It’s really an ideal term to describe what LLMs do.

I prefer "waffle" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_(speech) "Waffle machines" is even kind of funny.

Waffle means something very different though in the U.S., to “flip-flop” on a position. Not hold it for any fundamental reasons. But I don’t think you can say that an LLM holds a position whatsoever. Also, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit the essay originally popularizing the definition of bullshit considered here. Note the references to LLM output at he bottom.

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

#198

Post by rambambram »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #123
ta8645 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Thanks for this specific sentence.

Subscribed to your RSS feed. Although I will never know for sure if a human being posts there or a bot of some sort.

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

#199

Post by jcgrillo »

tmnvdb wrote: post #194
jcgrillo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed]

https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/

This is getting awfully tedious. Are you trolling or do you genuinely think responding to a question about actual compute cost trends with a venture fund's puff piece about sticker price trends is helpful?

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

#200

Post by flessner »

shaggie76 wrote: post #185

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all. Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty…

The travel and tourism industry is growing at around 4% YoY. So there is still a need (a growing need!) for "experiences" and "moments".

The "online bullshit" combined with no simple way towards ownership for younger generations are among the highest growth factors here in my opinion.

Still agreeing with your points, just wanted to add this context as there's likely a difference mentally between "social media" and "real world" authentic.

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