hazbota day ago
> It’s true that so-called “hallucinations” are an artifact of LLM technology that can never be totally eradicated. But if you think about it, humans make a lot of mistakes as well. A calculator that gives you the correct answer 90% of the time is still an impressive technological achievement!
I know this article is meant to be dissing on LLMs, am I too caught up in the mania that this sounds to me unironically like a positive argument for LLMs?
overtone1000a day ago
If you're being serious, my honest answer is yes. But, then, I'm the kind of person who refuses to part with my college texts and graphing calculator because of nostalgia.
purple_knocka day ago
No offense is intended with this comment, but genuinely, if you see a calculator that returns incorrect answers 10% of the time as a technological achievement in a world that has had deterministic calculators for the better part of a century, I think it's worth considering that you might be a little caught up.
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herbst17 hours ago
We have calculators that work 99.99% of the time. I am not sure of it makes sense to settle for 90% just because we could.
symfrog16 hours ago
Where have you seen a calculator that gives the wrong answer 0.01% of the time?
That would be unheard of.
ButlerianJihad15 hours ago
How about 1 in 9 billion?
karahimea day ago
I think it makes sense to see it positively. If one wants a calculator, we have calculators. The whole point is reaching things that deterministic calculations either can't or don't in a reasonable timeframe.
satvikpendem15 hours ago
Yes, because that would be an insanely bad calculator, 1 in 10 wrong answers?
conartist616 hours ago
I don't think this point is well stated. We have things like ECC to help with math being imperfect so that feels solvable. The problem with LLMs is much more subtle. They induce cognitive errors in humans. I'm doing it right now I'm saying "them" like they have individual identities, but they do not.
If you know they're just mirrors, then you know that looking in the mirror isn't the same as exploring the world.
It turns out, though, that many people can be trapped in a hall of mirrors. They will happily buy a condom for their brain.
simianwordsa day ago
This is a horrible article written by someone clearly upset about the state of things to process it objectively.
Please refute this argument: how can you expect 100% accuracy when your input is natural language which is fuzzy by definition?
clbrmbra day ago
> We’re already ripping the spines out of old rare paper books (we playfully call these “low-background steel”)
can someone closer to pretraining elaborate?
8bitsrulea day ago
Not at all close, but this link might give you more to go on (includes more links):
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-ra...
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
dmbchea day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
Replace "nuclear explosion" with "AI produced works"
tdeck17 hours ago
In this context it means "text written before the advent of AI slop, so we know it at least came from humans and wasn't influenced by AI slop".
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deepsquirrelnet12 hours ago
> Did an AI tell the United States to bomb that girls’ school in Iran, which killed 156 civilians?
Yes, because certainly the people who are supposed to be in charge bear no responsibility. This article does not make very good arguments. If the US was attacked by a foreign weapon based on AI, nobody would accept that argument.
> So you’re spending billions of dollars to make big machines that might guide us into socialism?
> No! Socialism is when the government collects the wealth of the entire population and spreads it out evenly so everyone is provided for.
Sigh... ah yes, the great tradition of lying about what Socialism is in order to make your unsupported argument.
andrewstuart16 hours ago
I’m glad my many open source projects contributed to making AI so awesome.
ahartmetz2 hours ago
If I could, I'd certainly prohibit AI training on FOSS code I've written. It is a very one-sided deal / grab: FOSS code in (for free), mostly proprietary code out (for pay to some mega-startups).