this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
296 points (97.4% liked)

Not The Onion

18044 readers
1093 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] fafferlicious@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Because it's not. The base architecture of how it works is by probabilistic word suggestion. That isn't thought.

We have a concept of self. We understand our place. We can interpret and respond to entirely new situations. LLMs routinely fail that. They regularly fall into local minima that keep it on the wrong path, and I've personally seen them just... Get lost in the weeds and swing back and forth based on what you tell it.

Give it a protein sequence and tell it to calculate the pI. Then tell it it's wrong. "Oh my bad yes you're right it's {whatever you said it was}."

Tell it you lied and that the number you said was wrong, and it turns up saying "Yes, you're correct, the pI is {original value}" - that is objectively false.

That is not the behavior of something that thinks. That's the behavior of a simple probability model updating priors and weighting things differently by the most recent information you gave it.

LLMs are soulless, brainless, thoughtless word generators. And they have some uses.