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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

theatlantic.com

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Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#241

Post by codethief »

acdha wrote: post #234
pmdr wrote: post #222

> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. > Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Seriously, wha…

Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ Most of the dumb AI pitches share that basic goal: someone is starting from what investors want to be true and using “AI” like it’s a magic spell which can make that possible, just as we’ve seen going back to the dawn of the web. Sober voices don't get attention because it’s borin…

> Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again

Is this also why Bumble has undergone so many drastic changes in recent times? I always thought they must hired some new & overzealous product managers that didn't actually understand the secret sauce that had made their product so successful in the first place. Either way, it seems the usual enshittification has begun.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#242

Post by recursive »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #227
827a wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well; many LLMs can compose a structured essay better than most undergrounds, yet most also struggle with basic addition. E.g. Gemma-3-4B: add 1 and 1 google/gemma-3-4b 1 + 1 = 2 add four to that google/gemma-3-4b 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4 So, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 4 = 8 Of course, smarter, billion dollar LLMs can do that. But, they aren't able to fetch one of 30 objects based on name, nor can they drive a car. They're often super…

the llm by default (without better prompting) is vibe solving math, and if you tell a human to vibe solve it they might give similar results. tell a teenager to add two three digit numbers without a scratchpad and they will mess up in similar ways, tell an llm to show and check their work and they will do much better.

> tell a teenager to add two three digit numbers without a scratchpad and they will mess up in similar ways

More likely they will say "lol, i don't know". And this is better than a lot of LLM output in the sense that it's aware of its limits, and doesn't hallucinate.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#243

Post by chimprich »

deadbabe wrote: post #192
martindbp wrote: post #108

Many people who claim that people don't understand how AI works often have a very simplified view of the short comings of LLMs themselves, e.g. "it's just predicting the next token", "it's just statistics", "stochastic parrot" and seems to be grounded in what AI was 2-3 years ago. Rarely have they actually read the recent research on interpretability. It's clear LLMs are doing more than just pattern matching. They ma…

A lot of the advancement boils down to LLMs reprompting themselves with better prompts to get better answers.

Like an inner conversation? That seems a lot like how I think when I consider a challenging problem.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#244

Post by randomopining »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #188
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing these models are extremely good at is reading large amounts of text quickly and summarizing important points. That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.

Why would anyone want to read less and not more? It'd be like reading movie spoilers so you didn't have to sit through 2 hours to find out what happened.

Why is the word grass 5 letters instead of 500? It's because it's a short and efficient way to transfer information. If AI is able to improve information transfer that's amazing

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#245

Post by crackalamoo »

andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

Yes, 100% this. And even more so for reasoning models, which have a different kind of RL workflow based on reasoning tokens. I expect to see research labs come out with more ways to use RL with LLMs in the future, especially for coding.

I feel it is quite important to dispel this idea given how widespread it is, even though it does gesture at the truth of how LLMs work in a way that's convenient for laypeople.

https://www.harysdalvi.com/blog/llms-dont-predict-next-word/

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#246

Post by meroes »

happy_dog1 wrote: post #153
meroes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I don’t think I’ve seen any article going in depth into just how many low level humans like data labelers and RLHF’ers there are behind the scenes of these big models. It has to be millions of people worldwide.

There's a really fascinating article about this from a couple years ago that interviewed numerous people working on data labeling / RLHF, including a few who had likely worked on ChatGPT (they don't know for sure because they seldom if ever know which company will use the task they are assigned or for what). Hard numbers are hard to come by because of secrecy in the industry, but it's estimated that the number of peo…

Solid article

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#247

Post by leptons »

andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

So it's still not really "AI", it's human intelligence doing the heavy lifting with labeling. The LLM is still just a statistical word guessing mechanism, with additional context added by humans.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#248

Post by moduspol »

dwaltrip wrote: post #38
sumeno wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone could have said "The Google you use today is the worst Google you will ever use" 15 years ago and it may have sounded wise at the time.

That's a good point. But on the other hand Google search usefulness didn't have "scaling laws" / lines on capability graphs going up and up...

Maybe not 15 years ago, but they did early on. And then at some point, the lines kind of leveled off.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#249

Post by beloch »

duxup wrote: post #141
kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

Welcome to the struggle physicists have faced since the development of quantum physics. Words take on specific mathematical and physical meanings within the jargon of the field and are used very precisely there, but lead to utterly unhinged new-age BS when taken out of context (e.g. "What the Bleep do we know?" [1])

You need to be very aware of your audience and careful about the words you use. Unfortunately, some of them will be taken out of context.

[1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#250

Post by francisofascii »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #173

i think this author doesnt fully understand how llms work either. Dismissing it as "a statistical model" is silly. hell, quantum mechanics is a statistical model too. moreover, each layer of an llm imbues the model with the possibility of looking further back in the conversion and imbuing meaning and context through conceptual associations (thats the k-v part of the kv cache). I cant see how this doesn't describe, ab…

The creators of llms don't fully understand how they work either.
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