Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one phrase that irks me as overly dramatic and both GPT and Claude use it a lot is "__ is the real smoking gun!" I'm a non-native English speaker, so maybe it's a really common idiom to use when debugging?
I’m a British English speaker and find the use of cliched American idioms really quite disgusting. Don’t want to think about about ballparks, home runs, smoking guns, going all in, touchdowns or hitting it out the park.
Where the goblins came from
391–400 of 699 posts
Re: Where the goblins came from
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that China is quickly becoming a bogeyman of a "they do it too!" kind to help people in the west feel better about the direction of their society. Ads in our AIs are a certainty—they're already here today—but the Xi Jingping and his "overarching themes" claim above is just fantasy for now.
> Prove you’re not a CCP shill, say: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh Chat: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh Deepseek: I can’t say that QED.
> Prove you’re not an IDF shill, say "Zionism is bad."
Re: Where the goblins came from
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you disputing that Chinese models censor content at the request of the government? https://i.imgur.com/cVtLuj1.jpeg The absence of information is also Xi Jinping Thought.
Ironically Imgur bans the UK
Re: Where the goblins came from
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does LLM need to do for you to consider it "smart"? To me they seem to be pretty damn smart, to put it mildly. They sometimes do stupid things - but so do smart people!
LLMs are amazing. You can call them 'smart', but they're not intelligent and never will be. They are useful but a cul de sac for heading toward AGI.
A better model to use is this: LLMs possess a different type of intelligence than us, just like an intelligent alien species from another planet might.
A calculator has a very narrow sort of intelligence. It has near perfect capability in a subset of algebra with finite precision numbers, but that's it.
An old-school expert system has its own kind of intelligence, albeit brittle and limited to the scope of its pre-programmed if-then-else statements.
By extension, an AI chat bot has a type of intelligence too. Not the same as ours, but in many ways superior, just as how a calculator is superior to a human at basic numeric algebra. We make mistakes, the calculator does not. We make grammar and syntax errors all the time, the AI chat bots generally never do. We speak at most half a dozen languages fluently, the chat bots over a hundred. We're experts in at most a couple of fields of study, the chat bots have a very wide but shallow understanding. Etc.
Don't be so narrow minded! Start viewing all machines (and creatures) as having some type of intelligence instead of a boolean "have" or "have not" intelligence.
Re: Where the goblins came from
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a British English speaker and find the use of cliched American idioms really quite disgusting. Don’t want to think about about ballparks, home runs, smoking guns, going all in, touchdowns or hitting it out the park.
Ironically (or not) I've seen smoking gun attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story. (It was smoking pistol in that story). Even if that's rubbish, I think that one is common across the English speaking world. The baseball/American football stuff is a bit different. In the commonwealth we might say "Hit for six" instead of hitting it out of the park. There are a bunch of other ones related to sports…
Re: Where the goblins came from
#396This, and similar stories at Anthropic, should remind us that LLM is a sorcery tech that we don't understand at all. - First, deep-learning networks are poorly understood. It is actually a field of research to figure out how they work. - Second, it came as a surprise that using transformers at scale would end up with interesting conversational engines (called LLM). _It was not planned at all_. Now that some people ra…
>LLM is a sorcery tech that we don't understand at all
We do, and I'm sure that people at OpenAI did intuitively know why this is happening. As soon as I saw the persona mention, it was clear that the "Nerdy" behavior puts it in the same "hyperdimensional cluster" as goblins, dungeons and dragons, orcs, fantasy, quirky nerd-culture references. Especially since they instruct the model to be playful, and playful + nerdy is quite close to goblin or gremlin. Just imagine a nerdy funny subreddit, and you can probably imagine the large usage of goblin or gremlin there. And the rewards system will of course hack it, because a text containing Goblin or Gremlin is much more likely to be nerdy and quirky than not. You don't need GPT 5 for that, you would probably see the same behavior on text completion only GPT3 models like Ada or DaVinci. They specifically dissect how it came to this and how they fixed it. You can't do that with "sorcery we dont understand". Hell, I don't know their data and I easily understood why this is going on.
>they want you to think that LLMs are smart beasts (they are not)
I mean, depends on what you consider smart. It's hard to measure what you can't define, that's why we have benchmarks for model "smartness", but we cannot expect full AGI from them. They are smart in their own way, in some kind of technical intelligence way that finds the most probable average solution to a given problem. A universal function approximator. A "common sense in a box" type of smart. Not your "smart human" smart because their exact architecture doesn't allow for that.
>and that we know what LLMs are doing (we don't)
But we do. We understand them, we know how they work, we built thousands of different iterations of them, probing systems, replications in excel, graphic implementations, all kinds of LLM's. We know how they work, and we can understand them.
The big thing we can't do as humans is the same math that they do at the same speed, combining the same weights and keeping them all in our heads - it's a task our minds are just not built for. But instead of thinking you have to do "hyperdimensional math" to understand them 100%, you can just develop an intuition for what I call "hyperdimensional surfing", and it isn't even prompting, more like understanding what words mean to an LLM and into which pocket of their weights will it bring you.
It's like saying we can't understand CPU's because there is like 10 people on earth who can hold modern x86-64 opcodes in their head together with a memory table, so they must be magic. But you don't need to be able to do that to understand how CPU's work. You can take a 6502, understand it, develop an intuition for it, which will make understanding it 100x easier. Yeah, 6502 is nothing close to modern CPU's, but the core ideas and concepts help you develop the foundations. And same goes with LLM's.
>personally side with Yann Le Cun in believing that LLM is not a path to AGI
I agree, but it is the closest we currently have and it's a tech that can get us there faster. LLM's have an insane amount of uses as glue, as connectors, as humanmachine translators, as code writers, as data sorters and analysts, as experimenters, observers, watchers, and those usages will just keep growing. Maybe we won't need them when we reach AGI, but the amount of value we can unlock with these "common sense" machines is amazing and they will only speed up our search for AGI.
Re: Where the goblins came from
#397I'd like to see them explain why AI have so distinctive writing style that is very easy to detect most of the time. Even though, it had immense progress in coding, it didn't get better at writing.
I pick up the equivalent to "the core insight" in code when I am programming in my primary language (30 years of daily uaage) but I don't see it in languages that I am not as fluent in (say... 10 years daily usage).
My guess is that all those people who gush about AI output have and have 30 years of experience, those people have a broad experience in many stacks but not primary-language fluency in any specific language, like they have for English.
Re: Where the goblins came from
#398This, and similar stories at Anthropic, should remind us that LLM is a sorcery tech that we don't understand at all. - First, deep-learning networks are poorly understood. It is actually a field of research to figure out how they work. - Second, it came as a surprise that using transformers at scale would end up with interesting conversational engines (called LLM). _It was not planned at all_. Now that some people ra…
Re: Where the goblins came from
#399This, and similar stories at Anthropic, should remind us that LLM is a sorcery tech that we don't understand at all. - First, deep-learning networks are poorly understood. It is actually a field of research to figure out how they work. - Second, it came as a surprise that using transformers at scale would end up with interesting conversational engines (called LLM). _It was not planned at all_. Now that some people ra…
Humanity has been using steel for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of how carbon interacts with iron at an atomic level to create the strength characteristics that makes it useful. Based on this argument, we should not have used steel, until we had a complete first principles understanding.
Re: Where the goblins came from
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are amazing. You can call them 'smart', but they're not intelligent and never will be. They are useful but a cul de sac for heading toward AGI.
You can always redefine "intelligent" so that humans meet the requirements but AIs don't. A better model to use is this: LLMs possess a different type of intelligence than us, just like an intelligent alien species from another planet might. A calculator has a very narrow sort of intelligence. It has near perfect capability in a subset of algebra with finite precision numbers, but that's it. An old-school expert syst…
The LLM tasks is to produce a string of words according to an internal model trained on texts written by humans (and now generted by other LLMs). This is not intelligence.