this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
503 points (94.8% liked)

Technology

59287 readers
5184 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Consider some human examples: sometimes people disagree with their doctor so they go see another doctor and another until they get the answer they want. Sometimes two very experienced lawyers both look at the facts and disagree.

This actually illustrates my point really well. Because the reason those people disagree might be

  1. Different awareness of the facts (lawyer A knows an important piece of information lawyer B doesn't)
  2. Different understanding of the facts (lawyer might have context lawyer B doesn't)
  3. Different interpretation of the facts (this is the hardest to quantify, as its a complex outcome of everything that makes us human, including personality traits such as our biases).

Whereas you can ask the same question to the same LLM equipped with the same data set and get two different answers because it's just rolling dice at the end of the day.

If I sit those two lawyers down at a bar, with no case on the line, no motivation other than just friendly discussion, they could debate the subject and likely eventually come to a consensus, because they are sentient beings capable of reason. That's what LLMs can only fake through smoke and mirrors.