amelia

I got my X3 a few months ago and I've read more books since then than in the last 3 years before that combined. Love the little thing.

I'm pretty sure it made me the scientist I am today.

Wie erklärst du dir den gleichen Aufstieg der Rechten in anderen europäischen Staaten sowie den USA? Hat Merkel da auch überall regiert?

It's just that it's a really odd "explanation". Good and bad depends a lot on who you ask. Millions of people would probably disagree with your judgement. I'm neither a Robbie Williams fan nor a music expert, but I'm pretty sure "his music is just bad" is not a valid explanation for the phenomenon.

What makes the Spice Girls better than Robbie Williams?

What are those objective criteria that classify music as "bad"?

Sure, Europeans just have bad taste in music, while Americans have good taste in music. That explains everything.

German here. He's super famous in Germany. I used to think he was an international superstar and only learned a couple of years ago that nobody knows him in the US. Still don't quite understand how that happened. How is "Feel" and "Angels" not stuck in everyone's head every once in a while?

Quantity of training material doesn’t confer new abilities. It makes the resulting weights more representative of the language of the materials, but it doesn’t give something the text doesn’t have.

You left out half of my sentence though. Size of the model does in fact confer new abilities. See, for example, this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

All of the problems you describe that LLMs have - it's true, and it holds for current LLMs. But it is not necessarily a fundamental limitation. Time will show how much better LLMs will become. I think the time of super fast progress is probably over, but there will still be improvements.

That is a damning verdict for a machine literally invented for computing. If there is one thing a computer should be good at, it should be the thing it was built for.

An LLM is not a computer. An LLM runs on a computer. You're mixing up two things here.

I think you vastly overestimate human abilities. It's a phenomenon I come across here on Lemmy all the time. It's like people believe their brains are capable of some sort of "analytical logic" as opposed to "numerical logic". As if "understanding" something was some sort of godly ability. I don't believe in a supernatural spirit or anything like that. We learn from external influences, we are statistical parrots as well. There is no absolute truth mechanism in our brains. We're conscious, yes, but just because understanding something feels so absolutely logical and true to you doesn't mean it's not just a result of the statistics your brain has learned from.

Was mich immer tierisch nervt: ich stehe draußen irgendwo rum, z.B. weil ich auf eine Bahn warte oder so, und plötzlich kommt so ein Wespenvieh und fliegt aufdringlich an mir herum. Setzt sich auf mich, fliegt mir ins Gesicht, und lässt einfach nicht von mir ab. Ich hab dann immer tierisch Schiss, dass ich das Biest irgendwie aus Versehen einenge und sie mich sticht. So ähnlich ist es mir einmal passiert - Wespe ist offenbar beim Gehen zwischen meinen Arm und den Riemen meiner Tasche geflogen und als sich beides einander näherte - zack, in den Arm gestochen. Also fuchtel ich dann eben doch rum, wenn eine nicht von mir ablassen will, damit sie verdammt noch mal abhaut. Was soll man sonst machen, stehen bleiben und warten bis sie einem im Gesicht rumkrabbelt?

I find that writing out and defending my position helps me refine it. Sometimes, my perspective on things shifts just by trying to explain it.

Same here. It's the best way to test my current views and beliefs and reshape or refine them.

That makes two of us :D Sometimes, these discussions help expand my Engish skills too.

Ah yes, hello there, fellow German. :D winkt fröhlich auf Deutsch ;)

It’s a text generator that predicts a likely series of words, based on the language patterns it learned from its training material.

Yes and no. While I do absolutely agree about the problem of reliability and false confidence, I do not agree on the general understanding of LLMs. You make it sound like it's merely a predictor of likely words, like your phone keyboard may suggest words you usually use in sequence. But it is really not that simple. I disagree with the - especially here on Lemmy - very widespread "parrot" analogy in the sense that imho people have a very oversimplified idea of what large language models actually are. They don't just count statistics of word sequences and then spit out the most likely combination. The amount of text they learn from is so big and their structure is complex enough that they can actually learn underlying patterns about WHY words are usually arranged in a certain pattern. That way, they can absolutely learn concepts and "skills" like logical reasoning, to a certain extent. The exact patterns they learned aren't even fully understood, but obviously it does work. Even early GPT models learned to do arithmetic - there are publications that show that GPT was able to calculate arithmetic problems that were not in the training data, although it did make mistakes. Funnily, the mistakes seemed similar to mistakes humans usually make, like forgetting carryovers in additions or subtractions. Still, it had apparently learned the concept of arithmetics, just by seeing examples (and maybe explanations - we don't really know). Modern LLMs absolutely capable of a certain level of logic. You can give ChatGPT a task it's never seen before and chances are it can solve it. Even if it can't - that doesn't make its reasoning qualitatively different from how a human brain works. My argument is that humans learn how to think "logically" by seeing examples too - and they fail at logic all. the. damn. time. Go to a city center and ask people logic puzzles - see how many will be able to solve them correctly (and maybe compare the result to an LLM). I wouldn't even be surprised if by now, even asking medical questions to doctors would, on average, yield worse results than a state-of-the-art LLM. I did a PhD in computer science a few years ago and I can tell you, I would probably rather trust the latest ChatGPT model on most questions regarding my field than myself. It has just become that incredibly good. I'm absolutely not saying it's perfect, it still makes stupid mistakes and you have to be aware of that, but so do people. I have not seen a single convincing argument why the concept of logic or reasoning that humans have is fundamentally different from that of LLMs. Most people suck at logic. And most men in my life regularly spit out false knowledge with a confidence only a mediocre white man and an LLM can have. ;P

In all seriousness - LLMs lack sensorimotor interaction with the world, and even if we give them robot bodies, they will never know what it's like to be human. In that sense, they will not replace us, and they will never be human. I would even agree that they will probably never be conscious (although of course we can't be sure, especially since we haven't understood consciousness yet in the first place). Their biases and their "way of thinking" will also most probably always be different from humans. But I do not agree that they cannot be "intelligent" in a logic/reasoning sense and that they are merely "statistical parrots".

The various executives of the big AI vendors are obviously capitalising on that, stoking the hype with grand and utopic visions because they want to sell their product. It’s not that it’s useless. It’s that the utility is far less than the lofty promises made by people milking the hype for all it’s worth. And that little utility comes at a terrible social, economic and ecologic price.

Agreed. I'm fascinated by how far AI has become, but it just isn't where marketers claim it is, and we can't be sure it will get there anytime soon.

I don’t think we should dismiss the consequences our use of US infrastructure has. Worse yet, I don’t think we should dismiss the political dependencies that creates.

True. Political dependencies are a serious problem and I'm pretty sure they play a big role in why the US actually lets AI companies get away with all the shit that they do.

I’ve seen people trying to argue with experts because “ChatGPT said” because they genuinely do not understand that ChatGPT is a parrot, not an expert.

Yeah. The point is: ChatGPT will not make you an expert. ChatGPT may act as an expert and even provide accurate information, but citing its answers will not magically make you an expert yourself. That is something that needs to be hammered into people's heads.

I’m not fighting it. I’m trying to pull it out of the pit that the current obsession with imitation has dug. When college students, the next generation or scientists, trades their scientific understanding for the convenience of high-tech parrots, that is the opposite of progress. It’s stagnation, fostered by those few people that are happily trading our future for their present profits.

Fair enough. We need to find ways to use AI as a useful tool, not a tool to make people lazy and stupid. Tbh, I think it will happen. It happened with Google as well. People used to use Google wrong all the time when it was still new. They clicked the first search result and believed absolutely everything it said. I'm kinda old, I remember that time. :P I'm pretty sure it will be similar with LLMs. By using them, we will learn their limitations and shortcomings, and many of us will learn the hard way. The marketing strategies of AI companies are NOT helpful with that.

We’ll need to understand the social dynamics of such technology to better prevent the disastrous side-effects. We’ll need to compare historical developments with present circumstances and plans to account for future developments. We’ll need to study the psychological effects of interacting with human-like machines to be able to correct course where needed.

I absolutely 100% couldn't agree more. AI has already had a lot and probably will have even more impact on us, on other technologies like medicine, biotechnology, probably chemistry, material sciences, and loads of other key technologies. We will have a LOT of trouble keeping up with that acceleration of technological progress as a society. In a world where even the existence of the internet doesn't seem to have been digested fully, AI has the potential to completely wreck everything. And certain people will do all they can to exploit that to gain power and money. And we will have to be faster than them.

In that sense, I agree that

Also, we really, really should spend less time thinking about whether we could and more about whether we should.

is probably right. The EU's AI Act is a good first step, but the world is in this together, and with the current geopolitical situation I honestly don't see us working together here for the good of humankind. So maybe trying to somehow decelerate technological progress really can be a reasonable way to take pressure out of that system. I'm not sure it's possible though.