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I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

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Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#451

Post by sandeepkd »

chii wrote: post #426
nonethewiser wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. … I've both seen online and heard people quote LLM output as if it were authoritative. Thats not an LLM problem. But indeed quite bothersome. Dont tell me what Chatgpt told you. Tell me what you know. Maybe you got it from ChatGPT and verified it. Great. But my jaw kind of drops when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct.

> when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct. people used to say the exact same thing with wikipedia back when it first started.

And that is still accurate today. Information always contains a bias from the narrators perspective. Having multiple sources allows one to triangulate the accuracy of information. Making people use one source of information would allow the business to control the entire narrative. Its just more of a business around people and sentiments than being bullish on science.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#452

Post by ukuina »

selfhoster wrote: post #253
gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

"It talks to me like a person." No, it provides responses. It does not talk.

ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode?

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#453

Post by worthless-trash »

prawn wrote: post #442
worthless-trash wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone saying 80% of doctors believe that LLM's are trustworthy consultation partners. Code created by LLM's doesnt compile, hallucinated API's.. invalid syntax and completely broken logic, why would you trust it with someones life !

I wonder if the exact phrasing has varied from the source, but even then if "consultation partners" is doing the heavy lifting there. If it was something like "useful consultation partners", I can absolutely see value as an extra opinion that is easy to override. "Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that option - I'll look into it further." I imagine we're talking about it as an extra resource rather than trusting it as…

I'll see if i can dig it up, it was from a real life meeting which I have tossed the printed notes from a while back in disgust.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#454

Post by worthless-trash »

prawn wrote: post #442
worthless-trash wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone saying 80% of doctors believe that LLM's are trustworthy consultation partners. Code created by LLM's doesnt compile, hallucinated API's.. invalid syntax and completely broken logic, why would you trust it with someones life !

I wonder if the exact phrasing has varied from the source, but even then if "consultation partners" is doing the heavy lifting there. If it was something like "useful consultation partners", I can absolutely see value as an extra opinion that is easy to override. "Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that option - I'll look into it further." I imagine we're talking about it as an extra resource rather than trusting it as…

> I imagine we're talking about it as an extra resource rather than trusting it > as final in a life or death decision.

I'd like to think so. Trust is also one of those non-concrete terms that have different meanings to different people. I'd like to think that doctors use their own judgement to include the output from their trained models, I just wonder how long it is till they become the default judgement when humans get lazy.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#455

Post by alabastervlog »

silisili wrote: post #430
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

That's what I really want. One thing I see a lot on X is people asking Grok what movie or show a scene is from. LLMs must be really, really bad at this because not only is it never right, it actually just makes something up that doesn't exist. Every, single, time. I really wish it would just say "I'm not good at this, so I do not know."

When your model of the world is build on the relative probabilities of the next opaque apparently-arbitrary number in context of prior opaque apparently-arbitrary numbers, it must be nearly impossible to tell the difference between “there are several plausible ways to proceed, many of which the user will find useful or informative, and I should pick one” and “I don’t know”. Attempting to adjust to allow for the latter probably tends to make the things output “I don’t know” all the time, even when the output they’d have otherwise produced would have been good.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#456

Post by low_tech_punk »

OP highlights application problems, and RAG specifically. But that is not an LLM problem.

Chat is such a “leaky” abstraction for LLMs

I think most people share the same negative experience as they only interact with LLMs through the chat UI by OpenAI and Anthropic. The real magic moment for me was still the autocompletion moment from the gh copilot.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#457

Post by wqaatwt »

TZubiri wrote: post #416
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

I always see this, and I always answer the same. This exists, each next token has a probability assigned to it. High probability means "it knows", if there's two or more tokens of similar probability, or the prob of the first token is low in general, then you are less confident about that datum. Of course there's areas where there's more than one possible answer, but both possibilities are very consistent. I feel LLM…

> low in general, then you are less confident about that datum

It’s very rarely clear or explicit enough when that’s the case. Which makes sense considering that the LLMs themselves do not know the actual probabilities

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#458

Post by alextingle »

anxoo wrote: post #368
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

would you rather the LLM make up something that sounds right when it doesn't know, or would you like it to claim "i don't know" for tasks it actually can figure out? because presumably both happen at some rate, and if it hallucinates an answer i can at least check what that answer is or accept it with a grain of salt. nobody freaks out when humans make mistakes, but we assume our nascent AIs, being machines, should a…

It would be nice to have some kind of "confidence level" annotation.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#459

Post by vunderba »

lostmsu wrote: post #233
lolinder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a difference between seeing them as valuable in their current state vs being "bullish about LLMs" in the stock market sense. The big problem with being bullish in the stock market sense is that OpenAI isn't selling the LLMs that currently exist to their investors, they're selling AGI. Their pitch to investors is more or less this: > If we accomplish our goal we (and you) will have infinite money. So the expecte…

I think that people who don't believe LLMs to be AGI are not very good at Venn diagrams. Because they certainly are artificial, general, and intelligent according to any dictionary.

Good grief. You are deeply confused and/or deeply literal. That's not the accepted definition of AGI in any sense. One does not evaluate each word has an isolated component for testing the truth of a statement in an open compound word. Does your "living room" have organs?

For your edification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#460

Post by bobsmooth »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #345
crazygringo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't. Because I know it does and it's incredibly easy to type something into Google Scholar and see if a reference exists. Like, I can ask a friend and they'll mistakenly make up a reference. "Yeah, didn't so-and-so write a paper on that? Oh they didn't? Oh never mind, I must have been thinking of something else." Does that mean I should never ask my friend about anything ever again? Nobody should be using the…

No, that doesn't mean you should never ask your friend things again if they make that mistake. But, if 30% of all their references are made up then you might start to question everything your friend says. And looking up references to every claim you're reading is not a productive use of time.

"you might start to question everything your friend says"

That's exactly what the OP is saying. Verify everything.

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