71–80 of 164 posts
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We are just finally seeing the mainstream get the idea they shouldn't trust anything on the internet. Long overdue.
Before these developments it was impossible to fake a politician saying arbitrary stuff. This is a major shift, there's no denying that.
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
This is a great summary of almost everything that goes wrong with LLM applications.
LLMs are autocomplete machines, which is why GitHub Copilot is still the most reliably useful application of LLM tech out there. The further you get from autocomplete, the less reliable the resulting product, because every problem has to be translated to an autocomplete problem to use LLMs and most translations are lossy!
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One of the common bad takes is that since personal things can be distilled to “just math” they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things. Increasing our understanding of how the world works shouldn’t devalue the world. To put it another way, people having souls is not the only reason to treat people like people. Or as Dr Seuss says: A person’s a person no matter how small.
> they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things There were people with your face or voice before, you just didn't care. AI continues a trend: the internet has always been post-scarcity, free copying and offering an amazing array of choices. We are acting as if it's a new thing, but it's been here for 25 years.
I do appreciate that not everyone agrees with that view, and that capitalism tries to value people at their output but intuitively plenty of people find that sort of thing wrong and ignoring that intuition is something I’d argue will not end well for us as a society.
Despite it being creepy, this is super cool from a technical standpoint.
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
> there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be people who argue that it’s a good thing, somehow. If this technology is going to exist (which it is), do you think it would be more harmful for everybody to have access to it, or for only some group of elites (big business, your own government, somebody else government, criminal groups, whoever) to have access to…
Generally speaking if you think most of the danger of any technology comes from accidents, you want fewer people to have it and don't care too much which ones it is, though it'd be preferable if they had a lot to lose.
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
Can someone pleasee convince why i shouldn't be absolutely shit out of my mind cynical about this innovation? we are literally seeing the downfall of trust in society. and no, i dont believe i am exaggerating
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
Can someone pleasee convince why i shouldn't be absolutely shit out of my mind cynical about this innovation? we are literally seeing the downfall of trust in society. and no, i dont believe i am exaggerating
I don't see this as any different. We will determine new ways of establishing trust. They'll certainly have flaws, as establishing trust in a society always has, but we'll learn to recognize those flaws and hopefully fix them.
Beyond that, what's the alternative? Banning the technology? That doesn't seem feasible for various reasons, not least of which is it isn't going to stop bad actors. Another pretty good reason is it's just not really possible - anyone with enough compute can build LLMs now.
As a bit of an aside, why hasn't society fallen yet? I mean, ChatGPT has been around for a couple years now, and I've been hearing about how LLMs are the single greatest threat to civilized society we've ever faced... yet they don't seem to have had a major impact.
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
> LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. This is a great summary of almost everything that goes wrong with LLM applications. LLMs are autocomplete machines, which is why GitHub Copilot is still the most reliably useful application of LLM tech out there. The further you get from autocomplete, the less rel…
When we teach children how to do arithmetic, we have them predict missing items in equations. We don't accuse them of "only doing autocomplete". The same applies for LLMs.
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Can someone pleasee convince why i shouldn't be absolutely shit out of my mind cynical about this innovation? we are literally seeing the downfall of trust in society. and no, i dont believe i am exaggerating
The way I see it LLMs are just making it more obvious to see all the flaws with the existing levels of trust. Humans have never had access to universal truths, or universal ways of validating anything. Any claim anybody makes could be intentionally or unintentionally deceitful or untrue. The idea that there are sources you can trust to do your thinking for you is the more dangerous illusion in my opinion, and I’m not…
There is no alternative to this idea. It is completely impossible for an individual to possess all of the knowledge of everything that affects their lives. The only option for getting some of this information is going to trusted sources that compile it and present some conclusions.
This applies just as much to scientific knowledge as it does to medicine or to politics.
If you want to avoid trusting any authority, it's hard to even confirm that North Korea exists. Confirming that it is ruled by an authoritarian regime and that it possesses nuclear weapons is impossible. And yet it's a trivial bit of info that everyone agrees on - imagine what avoiding trusted authorities would do to knowledge about other more subtle or more controversial topics.
It’s “unexpected” because their early training didn’t get rid of it as well as they hoped. LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. For now, it’s fairly harmless since it’s only a blooper in a lab, but there will likely be open-weights versions of this sort of thing eventually. And there will probably be p…
> LLM’s are good at detecting patterns and like to continue the pattern. They’re starting with autocomplete for voice and training it to do something else. This is a great summary of almost everything that goes wrong with LLM applications. LLMs are autocomplete machines, which is why GitHub Copilot is still the most reliably useful application of LLM tech out there. The further you get from autocomplete, the less rel…
They've succeeded in areas like mathematical problem-solving, creative tasks, and various real-world applications outside of GitHub Copilot. Sure, LLMs have limitations, but reducing them to autocomplete overlooks their nuanced language understanding and generation abilities. I also think the "lossy translation" argument doesn't give enough credit to the sophisticated ways problems can be reformulated for LLMs.