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Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

thebullshitmachines.com

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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#441

Post by anon373839 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #418
anon373839 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't actually mean that. It's a cynical, sad, and - quite frankly - false thing to believe.

Why? I don't have a problem recognizing that "being convincing" to the right people is a very good way of learning and verifying knowledge about objective reality. Just because it's by proxy, doesn't mean it doesn't work. This is how every one of us learns most things, and what's really sad to me is deluding yourself into thinking we're more special than that.

Honestly, it just sounds to me like you’ve come up with some axioms in your mind about the “fundamental nature” of humanity - and then granted yourself the luxury of certainty about them. That, with a dash of misanthropy, is something I’ve been seeing more and more on HN these days.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#442

Post by MantisShrimp90 »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

The writer is speaking from the perspective of the traditional philosophical understanding of a thinking being.

No, LLMs are not thinking beings with internal state. Even these "reasoning" models are just prompting the same LLM over and over again which is not true "logic" the way you and I think when we are presented with a new problem.

The key difference is they do not have actual logic, they rely on statistical calculations and heuristics to come up with the next set of words. This works surprisingly well if the thing has seen all text written, but there will always be new scenarios, new ideas it has not encountered and no these are not better than a human at those tasks and likely never will be.

However, what is happening is that our understanding of intelligence is being expanded, and our belief that we are going to be the only intelligent beings ever is under threat and that makes us fundamentally anxious.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#443

Post by pjs_ »

yapyap wrote: post #438
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

> “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever it does not, AI is predicting the next ‘token’ based on the last ‘token’. There is no sentience, it’s machine learning except the machines are really strong. It’d be illogical to say an AI has a ground truth just because it ‘ingested’ every paper ever.

What does sentience have to do with truth? I didn’t make that connection, you did. Wikipedia isn’t sentient but it contains a lot of truth. Raw data isn’t sentient but it definitely “has ground truth”.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#444

Post by pjs_ »

fmbb wrote: post #329
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

Training on all papers does not mean the model believes or knows the truth. It is just a machine that spits out words.

What experiment or measurement could I do to distinguish between a machine that “knows” the truth and a machine that merely “spits it out”? I’m trying to understand your terminology here

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#445

Post by CJefferson »

pama wrote: post #374

I wonder if the authors can explain the aparent inconsistency between what we now know about R1 and their statement “They don’t engage in logical reasoning” from the first lesson. My simple-minded view of logical reasoning by LLMs is that the hard question (say a math puzzle) has a verifiable answer that is hard to produce and is easy to verify, yet within the realm of knowledge of humans or the LLM itself, so the “t…

As an example, I have asked tools like deepseek to solve fairly simple Sudoku puzzles, and while they output a bunch of stuff that looks like logical reasoning, no system has yet produced a correct answer.

When solving combinatorics puzzles, deepseek will again produce stuff that looks convincing, but often makes incorrect logical steps and ends up with wrong answers.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#447

Post by pjs_ »

mrbungie wrote: post #435
pembrook wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are all the humans in this thread. Except, human mimicry of "reasoning" is usually applied in service of justifying an emotional feeling, arguably even less reliable than the non-feeling machine.

It has served us relatively fine for thousands of years. LLMs? I'm waiting for one that knows how not to say something that is clearly wrong with extreme confidence, reasoning or not.

The website that these comments are discussing (“Bullshit Machines”) says things that are probably wrong with extreme confidence

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#448

Post by eqqn »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

>“the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever)

It also ingested every reddit thread and tweets of every politician ever.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#449

Post by watwut »

I have to scroll or click a lot to get to the actual content. I would not bothered to read after three slogans if people did not praised it so much in the comments - and I am still unsure whether they like the content or the sundown picture.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#450

Post by spudlyo »

abzolv wrote: post #101

Your scroll-to-death user interface made me close the window before the end of the second page. Did you ask an LLM to recommend the most user-friendly UI to you?

I also could not get past my outrage about this, how about a link to the content in a format suitable for the old and cranky? Even raw text would be better than this.
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