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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

#561

Post by parliament32 »

tmnvdb wrote: post #82
qwGafv wrote: post #73

That's an interesting Altman quote on the site. LLMs cannot be compared to electricity and the Internet. People wanted those. LLMs were an impressive parlor trick at first but disappointing later. Many stopped using them altogether. Now there is a president who fuels the hype, shakes down rich countries for "AI" investments. The Saudi prince who lost money on Twitter is in for the new grift and praises Musk on Tucker…

People have stopped using LLMs? I wasn't aware of that. Can you share a source for that?

Anecdotal, but this is the exact consensus I saw among my non-tech peers. They find it fun for a few days or weeks, then basically never touch it again once the novelty wears off. The only normies I know still using LLMs are students using them to write papers.

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

#565

Post by remich »

sgt101 wrote: post #68
silvestrov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are always bullshitting, even when they get things right, as they simply do not have any concept of truthfulness.

They don't have any concept of falsehood either, so this is very different from a human making things up with the knowledge that they may be wrong.

But sometimes when humans make things up they also don't have the knowledge they may be wrong. It's like the reference to "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". Or Dunning-Kruger personified. Basically you have three categories:

(1) Liars know something is false and have an intent to deceive (LLMs don't do this) (2) Bullshitters may not know/care whether something is false, but they are aware they don't know (3) Bullshitters may not know something is false, because they don't know all the things they don't know

Do LLMs fit better in (2) or (3)? Or both?

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

#567

Post by bccdee »

meroes wrote: post #481
CJefferson wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teaching an LLM to solve a full sized Sudoku is not a goal right now. As an RLHF I’d estimate it would take 10-20 hours for a single RLHF’er to guide a model to the right answer for a single board. Then you’d need thousands of these for the model (or next model) to ingest. And each RLHF’s work needs checking which at least doubles the hours per task. It can’t do it because RLHF’ers haven’t taught models on large enou…

If it were actually reasoning generally, though, it wouldn't need to be trained on each game. It could be told the rules and figure things out from there.

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

#568

Post by JackSlateur »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #502
cristiancavalli wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I can “prove” it — look at any number of cases where LLMs can’t even do basic value comparisons despite being claimed as super intelligent. You can try and say well that’s a limitation of the technology and then I would reply — yes and that’s why I would say it’s not reasoning according the original human definition. Also you have yet to produce any evidence of reasoning and claiming you can over and over again do…

LLMs can reason they just don’t always reason. That’s the claim everyone makes. That is a human definition if it reasoned one time correctly. That is the colloquial definition. Someone who has brain damage can reason correctly on certain subjects and incorrectly on other subjects. This is an immensely reasonable definition. I’m not being pedantic or out of line here when I say LLMs can reason while using this definit…

Just say it : llm are random machine. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

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

#569

Post by mrbungie »

pembrook wrote: post #465
mrbungie wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, same can be said for humans.

Unless dealing with a psychopath you can deal with the lies using other subsystems.

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

#570

Post by habinero »

llm_trw wrote: post #354
habinero wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you don't need to know the details to evaluate something. You need the output and the null hypothesis. If a trading firm claims they have a wildly successful new strategy, for example, then first I want to see evidence they're not lying - they are actually making money when other people are not. Then I want to see evidence they're not frauds - it's easy to make money if you're insider trading. Then I want to see…

I don't get offended when people call my work a stochastic parrot. I just put them in the same bucket of intelligence as an 8b model and weight their inputs accordingly.

Right, DARVO.
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