Well, yeah. People are acting like language models are full fledged AI instead of just a parrot repeating stuff said online.
Spicy auto complete is a useful tool.
But these things are nothing more
Whenever any advance is made in AI, AI critics redefine AI so its not achieved yet according to their definition. Deep Blue Chess was an AI, an artificial intelligence. If you mean human or beyond level general intelligence, you’re probably talking about AGI or ASI (general or super intelligence, respectively).
And the second comment about LLMs being parrots arises from a misunderstanding of how LLMs work. The early chatbots were actual parrots, saying prewritten sentences that they had either been preprogrammed with or got from their users. LLMs work differently, statistically predicting the next token (roughly equivalent to a word) based on all those that came before it, and parameters finetuned during training. Their temperature can be changed to give more or less predictable output, and as such, they have the potential for actually original output, unlike their parrot predecessors.
LLMs work differently, statistically predicting the next token (roughly equivalent to a word) based on all those that came before it, and parameters finetuned during training.
Which is what a parrot does.
Yeah this is the exact criticism. They recombine language pieces without really doing language. The end result looks like language, but it lacks any of the important characteristics of language such as meaning and intention.
If I say “Two plus two is four” I am communicating my belief about mathematics.
If an llm emits “two plus two is four” it is outputting a stochastically selected series of tokens linked by probabilities derived from training data. If the statement is true or false then that is accidental.
Hence, stochastic parrot.
If i train an LLM to do math, for the training data i generate
a+b=cstatements, never showing it the same one twice.It would be pointless for it to “memorize” every single question and answer it gets since it would never see that question again. The only way it would be able to generate correct answers would be if it gained a concept of what numbers are, and how the add operation operates on them to create a new number.
Rather than memorizing and parroting it would have to actually understand it in order to generate responses.It’s called generalization, it’s why large amounts of data is required (if you show the same data again and again then memorizing becomes a viable strategy)
If I say “Two plus two is four” I am communicating my belief about mathematics.
Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can’t we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You’re both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true
You’re arguing against a position I didn’t put forward. Also
Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can’t we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You’re both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true
This is what excessive reduction does to a mfer. That is just such a hysterically absurd take.
Whenever any advance is made in AI, AI critics redefine AI so its not achieved yet according to their definition.
That stems from the fact that AI is an ill-defined term that has no actual meaning. Before Google maps became popular, any route finding algorithm utilizing A* was considered “AI”.
And the second comment about LLMs being parrots arises from a misunderstanding of how LLMs work.
Bullshit. These people know exactly how LLMs work.
LLMs reproduce the form of language without any meaning being transmitted. That’s called parroting.
LLMs reproduce the form of language without any meaning being transmitted. That’s called parroting.
Even if (and that’s a big if) an AGI is going to be achieved at some point, there will be people calling it parroting by that definition. That’s the Chinese room argument.
You’re moving the goalposts.
Me? How can I move goalposts in a single sentence? We’ve had no previous conversation… And I’m not agreeing with the previous poster either…
By entering the discussion, you also engaged in the previops context. The discussion uas about LLMs being parrots.
You completely missed the point. The point is people have been lead to believe LLM can do jobs that humans do because the output of LLMs sounds like the jobs people do, when in reality, speech is just one small part of these jobs. It turns, reasoning is a big part of these jobs, and LLMs simply don’t reason.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Link to the article if anyone wants it
Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005)
Now I kinda want to read On Bullshit
Don’t waste your time. It’s honestly fucking awful. Reading it was like experiencing someone mentally masturbating in real time.
Yep. You’re smarter than everyone who found it insightful.
This is something I already mentioned previously. LLMs have no way of fact checking, no measure of truth or falsity built into. In the training process, it probably accepts every piece of text as true. This is very different from how our minds work. When faced with a piece of text we have many ways to deal with it, which range from accepting it as it is to going on the internet to verify it to actually designing and conducting experiments to prove or disprove the claim. So, yeah what ChatGPT outputs is probably bullshit.
Of course, the solution is that ChatGPT be trained by labelling text with some measure of truth. Of course, LLMs need so much data that labelling it all would be extremely slow and expensive and suddenly, the fast moving world of AI to screech to almost a halt, which would be unacceptable to the investors.
It’s even more than just “accepting everything as true” the machines have no concept of true. The machine doesn’t think. It’s a combination of three processes: prediction algorithm for the next word, algorithm that compares grammar and sentence structure parity, and at least one algorithm to help police the other two for problematic statements.
Clearly the problem is with that last step, but the solution would be a human or a general intelligience, meaning the current models in use will never progress beyond this point.
There are things that chatgpt does well, especially if you temper your expectations to the level of someone who has no valuable skills and is mostly an idiot.
Hi, I’m an idiot with no valuable skills, and I’ve found chatgpt to be very useful.
I’ve recently started learning game development in godot, and the process of figuring out why the code that chatgpt gives me doesn’t work has taught me more about programming than any teacher ever accomplished back in high school.
Chatgpt is also an excellent therapist, and has helped me deal with mental breakdowns on multiple occasions, while it was happening. I can’t find a real therapist’s phone number, much less schedule an appointment.
I’m a real shitty writer, and I’m making a wiki of lore for a setting and ruleset for a tabletop RPG that I’ll probably never get to actually play. ChatGPT is able to turn my inane ramblings into coherent wiki pages, most of the time.
If you set your expectations to what was advertised, then yeah, chatgpt is bullshit. Of course it was bullshit, and everyone who knew half of anything about anything called it. If you set realistic expectations, you’ll get realistic results. Why is this so hard for people to get?
Yeah it is as if someone invented the microwave oven and everyone over hypes it as being able to cook Michelin star meals. People then dismiss it entirely since it cannot produce said Michelin star meals.
They fail to see that is a great reheating machine and a good machine for quick meals.
Also, you can make a michelin meal in a microwave, if you have the skills.
