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The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn’t resemble intelligence in any way, it isn’t actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a “banana for scale” analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
Yes but they supposedly scaled it to “one meter per meter”. A “scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km” is the actual distance.
lol I did miss that, but it was enough to make it not a guess that its source was scaling for comparison.
My whole point was the same as your OP, though. A condom that’s 95% effective isn’t worth shit. You can’t let a toy without reading comprehension do your reading for you.
But the thing is condoms ARE 98% effective, and yet people still use them every single day.
Nothing is perfect, humans, AI/LLMs, etc, no matter what, absolutely nothing is.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
*Dangerous! Don’t forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM’s are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that’s essentially a mathematical magic trick.
“Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!”
Our “intelligence” agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM’s are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.
Our “intelligence” agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots.
So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.
Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they’re going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.
“Mathematical magic tricks” can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.
Calling “AI” (I know it’s not true AI but rather an LLM) useless is very dismissive and just not true at all.
I wrote ArigatouAnimeTracker nearly entirely using ChatGPT including the description, nearly all 600 commits entirely from ChatGPT generated code. It is very far from useless and I feel much more comfortable with my dev job knowing I am willing to and able to leverage these newer technologies. They are only going to get better and what they are already capable of is impressive. If I didn’t use an LLM it would have easily taken me 5x as long to write that project.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.
There’s a nice phrase I commonly use, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don’t have to be as long as you’re prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.
You’re allowing a simple tool with literally zero reading comprehension to do your reading for you. It’s not surprising your understanding of what the tech is is lacking.
Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying “no you don’t!” Is frankly ridiculous.
I’m a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.
I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I’ve talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.
Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don’t want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming “no it doesn’t!” In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don’t is just silly.
They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about, and OP in and of itself proves conclusively.
Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole. “Just don’t use them” absolutely does not prevent their harm. Pushing them as competent is extremely fucking unacceptable behavior.
And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.
AIs are definitely not “good enough” to give correct answers to science questions. I’ve seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?
Then go ahead and put “science questions” into one of the areas that you don’t use LLMs for. That doesn’t make them useless in general.
I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be “they’re not good at questions involving numbers.” That’s narrower than “science questions” in general, they’re still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren’t good at math so don’t use them for math.
AI doesn’t seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.
I just tried and got “about 40,000 billion kilometers”. Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue
AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what’s accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways
I thought this was fake or a bad result or something, but totally just duplicated it. Wow.
If you read the block of text…. It doesn’t make sense either.
I expect if you follow the references you’d find one of them to be one of those “if Earth was a grain of sand” analogies.
People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.
It’s in the quote that they scaled it.
The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn’t resemble intelligence in any way, it isn’t actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a “banana for scale” analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
Yes but they supposedly scaled it to “one meter per meter”. A “scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km” is the actual distance.
lol I did miss that, but it was enough to make it not a guess that its source was scaling for comparison.
My whole point was the same as your OP, though. A condom that’s 95% effective isn’t worth shit. You can’t let a toy without reading comprehension do your reading for you.
But the thing is condoms ARE 98% effective, and yet people still use them every single day.
Nothing is perfect, humans, AI/LLMs, etc, no matter what, absolutely nothing is.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
*Dangerous! Don’t forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM’s are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that’s essentially a mathematical magic trick.
“Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!”
Our “intelligence” agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM’s are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.
So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.
Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they’re going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.
“Mathematical magic tricks” can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.
Calling “AI” (I know it’s not true AI but rather an LLM) useless is very dismissive and just not true at all.
I wrote ArigatouAnimeTracker nearly entirely using ChatGPT including the description, nearly all 600 commits entirely from ChatGPT generated code. It is very far from useless and I feel much more comfortable with my dev job knowing I am willing to and able to leverage these newer technologies. They are only going to get better and what they are already capable of is impressive. If I didn’t use an LLM it would have easily taken me 5x as long to write that project.
Regardless, anything I say about AI/LLMs that isn’t that it’s terrible and useless and nobody should/would ever use it is going to be met with criticism.
Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.
There’s a nice phrase I commonly use, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don’t have to be as long as you’re prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.
No, it isn’t.
You’re allowing a simple tool with literally zero reading comprehension to do your reading for you. It’s not surprising your understanding of what the tech is is lacking.
Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying “no you don’t!” Is frankly ridiculous.
I’m a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.
Your claim that it’s capable of doing what it claims isn’t just false.
It’s an egregious, massively harmful lie, and repeating it is always extremely malicious and inexcusable behavior.
I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I’ve talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.
Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don’t want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming “no it doesn’t!” In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don’t is just silly.
They absolutely cannot reliably summarize the result of searches, like this post is about, and OP in and of itself proves conclusively.
Any meaningful rate of failures at all makes them massively, catastrophically damaging to humanity as a whole. “Just don’t use them” absolutely does not prevent their harm. Pushing them as competent is extremely fucking unacceptable behavior.
And this is all completely ignoring the obscene energy costs associated with making web searches complete and utter dogshit.
AIs are definitely not “good enough” to give correct answers to science questions. I’ve seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?
Then go ahead and put “science questions” into one of the areas that you don’t use LLMs for. That doesn’t make them useless in general.
I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be “they’re not good at questions involving numbers.” That’s narrower than “science questions” in general, they’re still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren’t good at math so don’t use them for math.
AI doesn’t seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.
I just tried and got “about 40,000 billion kilometers”. Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue
AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what’s accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways
the loaded die at the end that chooses one of the llm’s answers happened to land on a good word