Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs will never be good at specific knowledge unless specifically trained for with narrow "if else" statements. Its good for broad general overview such as most popular categories of books in the world.
Really? Open-AI says PhD intelligence is just around the corner!
Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
81–90 of 478 posts
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#821. Model "performance" judged by proxy metrics of intelligence have improved significantly over the past two years.
2. These capabilities are yet to be stitched together in the most appropriate manner for the cybersecurity scenarios the author is talking about.
In my experience, the best usage of Transformer models has come from a deep integration into an appropriate workflow. They do not (yet) replace the new exploration part of a workflow, but they are very scarily performant at following mid level reasoning assertions in a massively parallelized manner.
The question you should be asking yourself is if you can break down your task into however many small chunks that are constrained by feasiility in time to process , chunk those up into appropriate buckets or even better, place them in-order as though you were doing those steps with your expertise - an extension of self. Here's how the two approaches differ:
"Find vulnerabilities in this code" -> This will saturate across all models because the intent behind this mission is vast and loosely defined, while the outcome is expected to be narrow.
" (a)This piece of code should be doing x, what areas is it affecting, lets draw up a perimeter (b) Here is the dependency graph of things upstream and downstream of x, lets spawn a collection of thinking chains to evaluate each one for risk based on the most recent change . . . (b[n]) Where is this likely to fail (c) (Next step that a pentester/cybersecurity researcher would take) "
This has been trial and error in my experience but it has worked great in domains such as financial trading and decision support where experts in the field help sketch out the general framework of the process where reasoning support is needed and constantly iterate as though it is an extension of their selves.
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#83Will LLMs end up like compilers? Compilers are also fundamentally important to modern industrial civilization - but they're not profit centers, they're mostly free and open-source outside a few niche areas. Knowing how to use a compiler effectively to write secure and performative software is still a valuable skill - and LLMs are a valuable tool that can help with that process, especially if the programmer is on the…
This seems like a probable end state, but we're going to have to stop calling LLMs "artificial intelligence" in order to get there.
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#84This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven. I have my own opinions, but I can't really say that they're not also based on anecdotes and personal decision-making heuristics. But some of us are going to end up right and some of us ar…
Agreed! And with all the gaming of the evals going on, I think we're going to be stuck with anecdotal for some time to come. I do feel (anecdotally) that models are getting better on every major release, but the gains certainly don't seem evenly distributed. I am hopeful the coming waves of vertical integration/guardrails/grounding applications will move us away from having to hop between models every few weeks.
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#85My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…
This is less an LLM thing than an information retrieval question. If you choose a model and tell it to “Search,” you find citation based analysis that discusses that he indeed had problems with alcohol. I do find it interesting it quibbles whether he was an alcoholic or not - it seems pretty clear from the rest that he was - but regardless. This is indicative of something crucial when placing LLMs into a toolkit. The…
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#86> Sometimes the founder will apply a cope to the narrative ("We just don't have any PhD level questions to ask") Please tell me this is not what tech-bros are going around telling each other! Are we implying that the problems in the world, the things that humans collectively work on to maintain the society that took us thousands of years to build up, just aren't hard enough to reach the limits of the AI. Jesus Christ…
It’s pretty likely that they have extremely dull problems like "running an inbound call center is a lot of work" or "people keep having their mail stolen and/or lying that they did" that "more smarter gpus" won't solve
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#87My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…
LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. Put an LLM on top of a search engine, and that's the appropriate tool for this use case. I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#88My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…
Gemini (2.5 Pro): "Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption." The answer I got ( https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03 ) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted fro…
"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."
Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. Put an LLM on top of a search engine, and that's the appropriate tool for this use case. I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.
> LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. LLMs are literally fundamentally incapable of understanding things. They are stochastic parrots and you've been fooled.
Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. Put an LLM on top of a search engine, and that's the appropriate tool for this use case. I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.
> LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. LLMs are literally fundamentally incapable of understanding things. They are stochastic parrots and you've been fooled.