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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#281

Post by jonahx »

pklausler wrote: post #105

LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as…

> And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as having value.

They have value because they are very fast, concise, and right "often enough."

People used to make your criticism about Wikipedia (and occasionally still do).

All of the following are true:

1. They regularly make errors

2. They require more caution than most people have to use effectively.

3. They have tremendous value.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#282

Post by flawn »

everdrive wrote: post #42
Brendinooo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's not really me doing the things, and I feel like a bit of a fraud I've been thinking about this a bit. We don't really think this way in other areas, is it appropriate to think this way here? My car has an automatic transmission, am I a fraud because the machine is shifting gears for me? My tractor plows a field, am I a fraud because I'm not using draft horses or digging manually? Spell check caught a word, am I…

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world. And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun…

I would like to use LLMs more to also learn and have fun - but it's about Output Maximization and that's a waste of time, to learn & apply myself.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#284

Post by johnnyanmac »

GMoromisato wrote: post #44

Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…

I don't pretend to know the long term future of llms. But I get this dismissal everytime I suggest "this is unsustainable, this is going to crash". No matter what trends I point to.

I won't pretend to know what lies beyond that. I just know on 5 years you're not going to spam AI in your deck and get millions in funding.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#285

Post by johnnyanmac »

ACCount37 wrote: post #114
svieira wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can meat think? Some of us used to think that meat spontaneously generated flies. Maybe someday we'll (re-)learn that meat doesn't spontaneously generate thought either?

I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust. And especially not now. Not when LLMs can already do pretty much anything that a human can - and some of those things they can even do well .

>I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust.

But you just did. You're praising the man behind the curtain and treating it as the pixie dust you dismissed.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#286

Post by johnnyanmac »

ryandrake wrote: post #174
Night_Thastus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that LLM output is so incredibly confident in tone. It really sounds like you're talking to an expert who has years of experience and has done the research for you - and tech companies push this angle quite hard. That's bad when their output can be complete garbage at times.

I think eventually humans are going to need to disregard confidence as any kind of indicator of quality, which will be very difficult. Something about us is hardwired to believe a confident delivery of words.

I wish they would. But ultimately it's built into our dna as a social group. When uncertain many want some sense of authority, even if said authority is completely making it up.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#287

Post by ACCount37 »

remich wrote: post #229
ACCount37 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What more are human brains than piles of wet meat? It's not an argument - it's a dismissal. It's boneheaded refusal to think on the matter in any depth, or consider any of the implications. The main reason to say "LLMs are just next token predictions" is to stop thinking about all the inconvenient things. Things like "how the fuck does training on piles of text make machines that can write new short stories" or "why…

The way I always like to think about it is: "a computer shouldn't be able to do this." I'm an SWE working in AI-related development so I have a probably higher baseline of understanding than most, but even I end up awed sometimes. For example, I was playing a video game the other night that had an annoying box sliding puzzle in it (you know, where you've got to move a piece to specific area but it's blocked by other…

The fundamental assumption under all of software engineering is: "computers don't think like humans do".

They can process 2 megabytes of C sources, but not 2 sentences of natural language instructions. They find it easy to multiply 10-digit numbers but not to tell a picture of a dog from one of a cat. Computers are inhuman, in a very fundamental way. No natural language understanding, no pattern recognition, no common sense.

Machine learning was working to undermine that old assumption for a long time. But LLMs took a sledgehammer to it. Their capabilities are genuinely closer to "what humans can usually do" than to "what computers can usually do", despite them running on computers. It's a breakthrough.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#288

Post by ACCount37 »

svieira wrote: post #280
ACCount37 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't give much merit to ideas that demand the existence of Magic Fairy Dust. And especially not now. Not when LLMs can already do pretty much anything that a human can - and some of those things they can even do well .

Given that everything the LLM can do it learned from human descriptions of the space ... one would have to posit a very inefficient language for that model not to do something with those billions of parameters. But when you fly because of a bunch of balloons sprinkled with magic fairy dust are pulling you up, the magic fairy dust is still at work.

Before LLMs, it wasn't even clear how much expressive power human languages have when divorced from the innate properties of human mind or other sensory inputs.

An LLM being able to pick up on so many features of human mind, despite not being innately human, just by looking at the text-only language data? Not an outcome everyone expected. Far from it.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#290

Post by gloomyday »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262
GMoromisato wrote: post #44

Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…

> Yes, LLMs are literally just matmul. How can anything useful, much less intelligent, emerge from multiplying numbers really fast? But then again, how can anything intelligent emerge from a wet mass of brain cells? After all, we're just meat. How can meat think? LLMs actually hint at an answer to that, but most people seem to be focusing too much on matmuls or (on the other end) specific training inputs to pay atten…

I've been around long enough to see this saying that "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore" in action many times.

It is almost infuriating how dismissive people are of such amazing technologies when they understand it. If anything, progress is often marked by having things becoming simpler rather than more complex. The SpaceX Raptor engine versions are such a cool example of that.

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