this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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I expect if you follow the references you'd find one of them to be one of those "if Earth was a grain of sand" analogies.
People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.
It's in the quote that they scaled it.
The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn't resemble intelligence in any way, it isn't actually capable of meaningfully doing so.
Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a "banana for scale" analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.
*Dangerous! Don't forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM's are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that's essentially a mathematical magic trick.
"Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!"
Our "intelligence" agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM's are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.
So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.
Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they're going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.
"Mathematical magic tricks" can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.