Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

quandyfactory.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#41

Post by j16sdiz »

lemmsjid wrote: post #36

I noticed he mentioned asking Bing, so I directly asked ChatGPT “who is Ryan McGreal?” and it wrote, “ Ryan McGreal is a writer, urbanist, and the editor of Raise the Hammer, an online publication that focuses on urban issues, transportation, and sustainability. He has been actively involved in advocating for better urban planning and transportation policies in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Please note that my knowledge…

Try it in other way: Ask something big (with lots of text, in this case: NYT) first .

Ask in this order:

1) what is NYT (New York times)?

2) Who is Ryan McGreal?

3) Did he wrote for NYT?

This build up more context for hallucinating

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#42

Post by danenania »

Using LLMs to write code, particularly in a statically typed language, is a good way to get a sense for how accurate they are, since most mistakes/hallucinations are readily apparent.

I've been using GPT-4 to write code almost daily for months now, and I'd estimate that it is maybe 80-90% accurate in general, with the caveat that the quality of the prompt can have a major impact on this. If the prompt is vague, you're unlikely to get good results on the first try. If the prompt is very thorough and precise, and relevant context is included, it can often nail even fairly complex tasks in one shot.

Regardless of what the accuracy number is, it strikes me as pretty silly to call them "BS Machines". It's like calling human programmers "bug machines". Yeah, we do produce a lot of bugs, but we somehow seem to get a quite a bit of working software out the door.

GPT-4 isn't perfect and people should certainly be aware that it makes mistakes and makes things up, but it also produces quite a lot of extremely useful output across many domains. I know it's made me more productive. Honestly, I can't think of any programming language, framework, technique, or product that has increased my productivity so quickly or dramatically in the 17 years I've been programming. Nothing else even comes close. Pretty good for a BS machine.

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#43

Post by mlsu »

So what?

Today, ChatGPT helped me write a driver.

The driver either compiles, or it doesn't; it compiled. The driver either reads a value from a register, or it doesn't; it read. The driver either causes the chip to physically move electrons in the real world in the way that I want it to, or it doesn't.

The real world does not distinguish between bullshit or not. Things either work or they do not. They either are one way, or they are another way. ChatGPT produces things that work in reality. We humans live in reality. Reality is what matters.

I notice a thread through all of the breathless panicking about LLMs: it does not correspond to REALITY. It's a panic about a fiction. The fiction that the content of text is reality itself. The fiction that the LLM can somehow recursively improve itself. The fiction that the map is the territory.

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#44

Post by haimez »

dekhn wrote: post #30
haimez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM’s are spitting out responses based on their inputs. It is (or was) shockingly effective, but there is no generalized math processing going on. That’s not what LLM’s are, that’s not how they work.

And yet, trained on a large corpora of correct math statements, they produce responses that are more often right than wrong (I am taking this for true- it might not be)- which simply raises more questions about the nature of math.

…or the nature of the question and corpus?

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#45

Post by GoodJokes »

DennisP wrote: post #26
httpz wrote: post #16

To be honest, I hated writing essays in English classes because I felt like I'm forced to write BS to fill up the space when my argument can be summed up in several bullet points. Since I'm not a student anymore, I can just give ChatGPT a few bullet points and ask it to write a paragraph for me. As an engineer who doesn't like writing "fluff", it's great I can now outsource the BS part of writing.

Yep it's great for work emails. Incoming too, since they can summarize a long email into bullet points. The future is people typing bullet points, expanding into polished prose for transmission, and compressing down to bullet points on the other end.

[dead]

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#46

Post by GoodJokes »

httpz wrote: post #16

To be honest, I hated writing essays in English classes because I felt like I'm forced to write BS to fill up the space when my argument can be summed up in several bullet points. Since I'm not a student anymore, I can just give ChatGPT a few bullet points and ask it to write a paragraph for me. As an engineer who doesn't like writing "fluff", it's great I can now outsource the BS part of writing.

[dead]

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#47

Post by mcint »

Most people, most of the time are just BS machines. Obligatory -- but also question of the standards, presupposed purpose. Many dreams for what AI can be, can do, can provide sounds similar in the hoped futures they enable. That does not mean that the particular next-step goals of designers and implementers of different systems will achieve the same ends.

These ones are premised on regurgitating inputs. That they can imitate more than one observer's interpretation of truth at one time. More the better.

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#49

Post by ryan_mc_g_real »

yawnxyz wrote: post #9

I'm surprised it doesn't touch on "creativity" which is a form of BS. So is being able to summarize or extract books and papers. Unless it's mechanical work, it requires some form of BS, and that's why we've traditionally been so much better at this than machines. We've never been able to create "BS machines" before, so this completely shifts the paradigm.

I would argue that creativity involves generating new ideas through a combination of divergent thinking (to imagine new associations between unrelated things) and convergent thinking (to bring a relational model from one domain into another), and is orthogonal to Frankfurt’s conception of BS as defined by indifference to the objective truth or falsity of a fact claim.

Re: Today's Large Language Models Are Essentially BS Machines

#50

Post by joshspankit »

Counterpoint:

Humans have been incentivized to essentially be BS machines.

From low-quality blog posts to the highest-grossing marketing and everything in between (including many published books and scientific papers): BS makes enough money that it’s low-effort gives a decent ROI.

Of course an AI trained on a large human corpus is going to produce BS. It’s just doing what it learned.

Post reply on HN