this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
393 points (95.4% liked)

Technology

59569 readers
4136 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
[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Exactly, the LLM isn't "thinking," it's just matching inputs to outputs with some randomness thrown in. If your data is high quality, a lot of the time the answers will be appropriate given the inputs. If your data is poor, it'll output surprising things more often.

It's a really cool technology in how much we get for how little effort we put in, but it's not "thinking" in any sense of the word. If you want it to "think," you'll need to put in a lot more effort.

[–] ricdeh@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Your brain is also "just" matching inputs to outputs using complex statistics, a huge number of interconnects and clever digital-analog mixed ionic circuitry.

At a super high level, sure. But human brains also have tens of thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands) to develop, so it's not like a newborn baby is working off a blank slate, there's a ton of evolutionary circuitry in there that influences things.

That's why an algorithm that is based on human data will never quite work like a human. That doesn't mean it's not intelligent, it just requires a different set of requirements. That's why I think the Turing test is a bad metric, since an LLM could just find "proper" responses given a bunch of existing conversations without having to reason about the conversation.

Real intelligence, imo, would need to be able to learn to solve puzzles without seeing similar puzzles. That's more the domain of other "AI" fields like neural networks and machine learning. But each field approaches problems in a different, limited way, so general AI will be quite complicated unless we find a new approach.