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

thebullshitmachines.com

631–640 of 652 posts

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

#631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep repeating myself because you seem unable to accept information. I responded to your post with my thoughts and my own reframing of the question to try and open the conversation; you entirely ignored this in your response. Maybe you think this info is new to me but it’s not and it doesn’t prove anything for many more reasons than just the ones I cited in my prior response. > Not sure if you are trolling now. N…

Reasoning is not understood even among humans. We only know the black box definition in the sense that whatever we are doing it is reasoning. If an LLM arrives at the same output a human does given input and the output is sufficiently low probability to happen by random chance or association then it fits the term reasoning insofar as the maximum extent in which we understand it. Given that we don't know what's going…

Not sure why this got so acrid but I don’t really have any reason to interact with someone saying I have “no merit” You might want to look at how bent-out-of-shape you are getting about a rando on the internet disagreeing with you.

Why I would lie about plugging in your problem into an LLM or solve it is beyond me; you know I don’t lose anything by admitting you’re right? In fact I would stand to gain from learning something new. I think you should examine how you approach an argument because every time you’ve replied it’s made it look like you’re just more desperate for someone to agree and are trying to bully people into agreeing by making ad hominem attacks. Despite it all I think you have merit as a person — even if you can’t make a cogent argument and just chase your tail on this topic.

I’m going to stop engaging with you for now on, but just as a piece of perspective for you: both o3 and Gemini pointed out how your problem is a derivation when asked — perhaps you might be overestimating its novelty. Gemini even cited derivations out the gate.

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

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning is not understood even among humans. We only know the black box definition in the sense that whatever we are doing it is reasoning. If an LLM arrives at the same output a human does given input and the output is sufficiently low probability to happen by random chance or association then it fits the term reasoning insofar as the maximum extent in which we understand it. Given that we don't know what's going…

Not sure why this got so acrid but I don’t really have any reason to interact with someone saying I have “no merit” You might want to look at how bent-out-of-shape you are getting about a rando on the internet disagreeing with you. Why I would lie about plugging in your problem into an LLM or solve it is beyond me; you know I don’t lose anything by admitting you’re right? In fact I would stand to gain from learning s…

>Why I would lie about plugging in your problem into an LLM or solve it is beyond me;

I interpreted it as you saying you solved it without the LLM. Apologies then for the misinterpretation.

Yeah I agree no point in continuing this conversation. We disagree, there's no moving forward from that.

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

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's mimicry of reason is indistinguishable from real reasoning, how is it not reasoning? Ultimately, an LLM models language and the process behind it's creation to some degree of accuracy or another. If that model includes a way to approximate the act of reasoning, then it is reasoning to some extent. The extent I am happy to agree is open for discussion, but that reasoning is taking place at all is a little hard…

I am getting two contradictory but plausible seeming replies when I ask about a certain set being the same when adding 1 to every value in the set, asked on how I ask the question. Correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/67a9500b-2360-8007-b70e-0bc2b84bc1... Incorrect answer (I think): https://chatgpt.com/share/67a950df-d4e0-8007-8105-95a9e5be19...

What led you to beleive that mathematics is a good tool for evaluating an LLM? It is a thing they currently dont do well, since it is wildly out of domain of their training corpus - down the very way we structure information for an LLM to ingest. If we start doing the same for humans, most humans are in deep trouble.

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

#634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 1994. Larry Llyod Mayer has read the entire internet, hundreds of thousands of studies across every field, and can answer queries word for word the same as modern LLMs do. He speaks every major language. He's not perfect, he does occasionally make mistakes, but the sheer breadth of his knowledge makes him among the most employable individuals in America. The Pentagon, IBM, and Deloitte are begging to hire him. I…

Does his accuracy take a sudden precipitous fall when going from multiplying two three-digit numbers to two four-digit numbers?

In the very unserious hypothetical I'm describing, I'd say Lloyd's capabilities match that of GPT-4. In this case, he's not a calculator, but he is a decent programmer, so like GPT-4 he quickly runs the operation through a script, rather than trying to figure it out in his head.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67ac17df-fd9c-800d-9d3d-03c66b3e86...

"The result of 720947×263647 is 190,075,513,709."

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

#635
post #529

Fascinating. The article repeatedly makes the claim that “LLMs work by predicting likely next words in a string of text”. Yet there’s the seemingly contradictory implication that we don’t know how LLMs work (ie we don’t know their secret sauce). How does one reconcile this? They’re either fancy autocompletes, or magic autocompletes (in which case the magic qualifier seems more important in understanding what they are…

This occurs because of ambiguous language which conflates the LLM algorithm with the training-data and the derived weights. The mysterious part involves whatever patterns might naturally exist within bazillions of human documents, and what partial/compressed patterns might exist within the weights the LLM generates (on training) and then later uses. Analogy: We built a probe that travels to an alien planet, mines out…

I very much like this analogy. Thank you for making this clearer in my mind.

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

#636
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok? I too have been coding for over a decade and use Copilot as fancy autocomplete. I like it. It's not amazing.

Claude isn't Copilot, and I wasn't using it as autocomplete. I was using it to do things such as: - Creating a migration from the old DB to the new DB, no modifications of the generated code necessary - Refactoring state in a component out into a ViewModel, again no modifications necessary - Creating all the classes necessary for interacting with a Room database (i.e. the data class, dao, and DI module) given a schem…

I would consider all of that fancy autocomplete. If it's just helping you type boring boilerplate things you would have typed anyway, that's autocomplete.

It's neat, but it's not the paradigm shift people seem to think it is. Copilot mostly just replaces StackOverflow searches for me.

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

#637
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude isn't Copilot, and I wasn't using it as autocomplete. I was using it to do things such as: - Creating a migration from the old DB to the new DB, no modifications of the generated code necessary - Refactoring state in a component out into a ViewModel, again no modifications necessary - Creating all the classes necessary for interacting with a Room database (i.e. the data class, dao, and DI module) given a schem…

I would consider all of that fancy autocomplete. If it's just helping you type boring boilerplate things you would have typed anyway, that's autocomplete. It's neat, but it's not the paradigm shift people seem to think it is. Copilot mostly just replaces StackOverflow searches for me.

I was a little too young to really remember the early internet era and the skeptics, but looking back at that era in hindsight, it's interesting to see the commentary from those who thought it was a fad, or not impressive, or did everything to downplay what was so obviously one of the biggest technological advances in human history. I can't help but feel I am witnessing these same type of comments and viewpoints in real time from people like you on the subject of AI. It's a funny feeling, like watching a slow moving train wreck about to happen. There are going to be people left behind in the world because of their failure to adapt to the new tech, just like there was during the advent of the internet age, and it just seems so obvious already as to who those people are going to be.

"I just don't get what is so great about websites, they are just fancy books! It mostly just replaces going to the book store for me." - you of yesteryear

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

#638

There seems to be a lot of coping in the anti-AI department about the utility of the current LLMs. "I'm not impressed". You're not impressed that 98% of knowledge workers can 10-100x their own work output for free? As a very intelligent infrastructure engineer told me: AI isn't going to take your job, but someone using AI is.

[deleted]

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

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting two contradictory but plausible seeming replies when I ask about a certain set being the same when adding 1 to every value in the set, asked on how I ask the question. Correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/67a9500b-2360-8007-b70e-0bc2b84bc1... Incorrect answer (I think): https://chatgpt.com/share/67a950df-d4e0-8007-8105-95a9e5be19...

What led you to beleive that mathematics is a good tool for evaluating an LLM? It is a thing they currently dont do well, since it is wildly out of domain of their training corpus - down the very way we structure information for an LLM to ingest. If we start doing the same for humans, most humans are in deep trouble.

Well I am studying mathematics, and I use the LLM to help me learn.

They aren't terrible, and they have all of arXiv to train on. Terrence Tao is doing some cool stuff with it - the idea will be an LLM to generate Lean proofs.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113132502735585408

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/12/05/ai-for-math-fund/

(Professor Tao is probably the best or at least most productive in the most fields current mathematician).

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

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What led you to beleive that mathematics is a good tool for evaluating an LLM? It is a thing they currently dont do well, since it is wildly out of domain of their training corpus - down the very way we structure information for an LLM to ingest. If we start doing the same for humans, most humans are in deep trouble.

Well I am studying mathematics, and I use the LLM to help me learn. They aren't terrible, and they have all of arXiv to train on. Terrence Tao is doing some cool stuff with it - the idea will be an LLM to generate Lean proofs. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113132502735585408 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/12/05/ai-for-math-fund/ (Professor Tao is probably the best or at least most productive in the most fields cur…

And I can assure you when I start to talk about these topics with the average human person that doesn't know the material, they just laugh at me. Even my wife who has a PhD in physics.

Here's some cool math I learned from a regular book, not an LLM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khinchin%27s_constant

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