this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

that's a misleading and meaningless way of putting it. if I rip a page out of my textbook and bring it into an exam room, I do not have with me all the data in my textbook. and yet

[–] QuaternionsRock -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

It doesn’t do that, either. LLMs retain the linguistic patterns found in textbooks, nothing more. It’s remarkable that they can do so much with this information alone, but it’s still a far cry from genuine intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

And yet they can spit out copyrighted material verbatim, or near-verbatim, how strange and peculiar.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, even setting aside the intelligence claims, I know I'd be feeling a lot more positive about LLMs as a fun theoretical tool if they weren't being sold as personal assistants or search engine replacements etc, which even the apologists here admit they're really really bad at.

(Also I'd argue "linguistic patterns" is pushing it. "Textual patterns" more like, it's not supposed to have any idea about grammar or even about what "text" is.) (I say "supposed to" because who knows what sort of hacks they're running under the hood.)

[–] QuaternionsRock 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah I completely agree with you there. I really don’t like the way AI is being monetized and commercialized; it all just seems poised to go terribly. Ideally there shouldn’t be any incentive to overstate the capabilities of these models, as doing so just makes everything worse.