• huginn@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    As a programmer: most people vastly overestimate the efficacy of large language models.

    CEOs seem to overestimate them even more than everyone else.

    A lot of AI researchers think LLMs are a dead end (See: Timnit Gebru) because by their structure they cannot understand truth.

    The “hallucinations” are intrinsic to the structure and the best minds are saying there’s no way around that.

    We might be able to cludge together filters over it but at some point that’s just hard coding the world anyways, which is what LLMs are supposed to avoid.

    • secrethat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      As a data scientist, people seem to just attribute anything that is a computer and they don’t understand to AI or worse ChatGPT. Shudder

      • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I prefer people misattributing everything to AI over people using the word “auto-magic-ally” to describe anything happening on the back end.

    • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using chatgpt a lot, and it’s really clear to me it has many uses, but it’s almost more like asking your buddy who knows a lot but is full of shit too – sometimes he tells you exactly what you need, sometimes he sends you on a wild goose chase with all kinds of false leads.

      In the end you need your own competence because the human needs to be able to make a final decision about whether to listen or not.

      • huginn@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        My EM suggested an integration using an SDK that doesn’t exist.

        He was very insistent that we just hadn’t read the docs.

        Then it came out that it was chat gpt suggesting it.

    • candybrie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Have you seen the work where they use another instance to fact check the first? The MS Research podcast made it seem like a really viable way to find hallucinations without really needing to code more. I’m curious if other people find that works or if MS researchers are just too invested in gpt.

      • huginn@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        I’ll check out that podcast but I’m deeply skeptical that one LLM can correct another since neither of them truly understands anything: it’s all statistics. Very detailed stats but still stats.

        And stats will be wrong.

        Before chatgpt released most Google AI engineers were looking into alternatives to LLMs as the limitations of an LLM were increasingly clear.

        They’re convincing facsimiles of intelligence and a good tool for maybe 80% of basic uses.

        But I agree with the consensus: they’re a dead end in our search for intelligence and their output is vastly overestimated

        • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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          1 year ago

          They’re treated like something more than they are because we anthromorphise everything, and in our brains we assume anything that can string a sentence together is intelligent. “Oh, it can form a sentence! That must mean it’s pretty much already general intelligence since we gauge the intelligence of humans by the sentences they say!”