Technology

LLMs are awful for facts, because they don't understand what facts are. You should never rely on them if you require factual correctness.

They are OK for text summation, formatting and just making shit up. For summation a human with experience still produces nicer output, because they understand the content and don't just look at words. As for making shit up you will get the statistically most likely output, so it's usually trite and boring. I think the progress is amazing, but there are still so many problems to be solved.

Right now I use them for boiler plate stuff, like writing a text with some parameters and then I polish it. For code I find them quite useless, because with an IDE I can write boiler plate just as fast as when I polish the prompts until the LLM delivers useful stuff. And with the IDE I don't get references to methods or entire libraries that just don't exist.

I use LLMs for having things explained to me, too.. but if you want to know how much salt to pour in that soup, try asking it about something niche and complicated you already know the answer to.

They can be useful in figuring out the correct terminology so that you can find the answer on your own, or for pointing some very very obvious mistakes in your understandings (but it will still miss most of them).

Please don't use those things as answer machines.

He's not saying "AI is done, there's nothing else to do, we've hit the limit", he's saying "bigger models don't necessarily yield better results like we had initially anticipated"

Sam recently went before congress and advocated for limiting model sizes as a means of regulation, because, at the time, he believed bigger would generally always mean better outputs. What we're seeing now is that if a model is too large it will have trouble producing truthful output, which is super important to us humans.

And honestly, I don't think anyone should be shocked by this. Our own human brains have different sections that control different aspects of our lives. Why would an AI brain be different?

I've been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.

Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can't even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.

LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this--probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn't self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.

Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts' sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn't exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn't exactly conscious like you or I.

I think he's trying to steal the lightning from the episodes that resonated well with the audiences to make new episodes and it's just not hitting quite as hard.

The old formula was amazing stories meets Twilight zone meets tales from the crypt we're 8 out of 10 times the protagonist gets right fucked for just trying to be a good person.

It feels to me like the take away from san junipero was that people like happy endings so they're trying to apply it to everything

The reason you got Maisy day is because he got access to Miley Cyrus and had to write something that she would be happy with.

I really, really could not get behind the premise that the PM of the UK would fuck a pig to save a princess.

In the real world, it would have been "we do not make deals with terrorists" and that would be that, ratings be damned. Like holy shit, did he start with a completely unrealistic premise.