For the specialists: how much of temperature settings would help on the regression to the mean? Doe
Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#32This is my biggest concern. Speaking as someone who recently had to read 60 AI generated reports (the whole issue of how much students are using AI is one discussion), it was genuinely soul-destroying reading the same phrases, seem sentence structures, same arguments over and over. Depressed me the whole of the next day.
Every student is forced to read the same materials and books. Tests are designed to test how close they remember the same correct answers. It’s always been rare that a novel interpretation or idea has come out of a classroom. The modern, structured education has never been designed to generate creative people.
True - but it did have the benefit of giving the majority of people who passed through it the same benefit of a baseline understanding of "things" - those with aptitude and talent (and time and privilege) could take that further and build upon those fundamentals.
Now however, if people are not even internalizing those fundamentals in order to even re-write things in their own words, using their own "mental model" (perhaps correct, sometimes not) - I fear they won't even develop "mental models" and abstractions...
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#33I've been calling this Software Collapse
It's the same problem that AI faces of Model Collapse: AIs that train on the internet ultimately just end up training on one another, stop moving forward, and end up as identical polished versions of one another
I now think of it as a Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde situation for software projects:
- Dr. Jekyll: For makers, the only limit is your imagination, architectural guidance, and token budget. Time to build!
- Mr. Hyde: For projects to get off the treadmill of having to copy others to maintain you position, you need to redefine how the project works and provides unique value. Features and quality are no longer the answer. Time to fight!
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#34impossible to read through this, ironically the entire page feels ai generated.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#35This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs. To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, o…
It’s human nature to pattern-match experiences. As the number of experiences grows, more fit into something seen before. So, yes, we’re just getting old.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#36This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs. To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, o…
there is also the fact those tools increased the number of offerings but the quality did not improve.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#37This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs. To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, o…
Alex Murrell has a great piece on this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
The generic city one makes no sense. Does the author want each city to invent a new physics? Not only are there quite a few different looking buildings in each of the cities, but given the constraints of not have unlimited funds, surely one can understand that many columns of steel, concrete, and glass will look like columns of steel, concrete, and glass from afar.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#38This is my biggest concern. Speaking as someone who recently had to read 60 AI generated reports (the whole issue of how much students are using AI is one discussion), it was genuinely soul-destroying reading the same phrases, seem sentence structures, same arguments over and over. Depressed me the whole of the next day.
Man if I ever had to read 60 AI reports, I'd quit on the spot.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#39The output of a GPT is an interpolation (an estimation of new data points inside the range of known data) rather than extrapolation (estimations outside that range). 99% of the time we don't need a true intellectual breakthrough to get the job done, and often 'new ideas' are simply riffs on or blends of old ones, like fashion or music genres. The worry to me, however, is that if society comes to rely on this form of…
> if you couldn't do long division by hand
But the people studying math and the related fields are able to do division by hand on paper. They are just slow when doing it.
I believe that the calculator was meant to solve the slowness problem rather than eliminate the need to fundamentally understand division.
Re: Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
#40The recent breakthrough of llm’s solving major open problem’s in math is a direct contradiction to the article.
But, there is some truth to the article and perhaps it is more true in chat based interactions. The agentic, hands-off mode might tell a different story.