This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.
It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses
You say this like this is wrong.
Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.
"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can't read at a seventh grade level.
Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.
This is sad. This does not spark joy. We're months from someone using "but look, ChatGPT says..." To try to win an argument. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that LLMs are really fancy bullshit generator toys.
Already happened in my work. People swearing an API call exists because an LLM hallucinated it. Even as the people who wrote the backend tells them it does not exist
Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.
"US".... Even LLM won't vote for Trump
LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.
Bot even that smart. There a study recently that simple questiona like "what was huckleberry finn first published" had a 60% error rate.
They're right
I know enough people for whom that's true.
As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of "smarter" was left to the respondents, and "answers as if it knows many things that I don't know" is certainly a reasonable definition -- even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn't know anything.
As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty "smart":
what's a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn't want to use "subjects" because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.
"Respondents" is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.
The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.
No one has asked so I am going to ask:
What is Elon University and why should I trust them?
Ironic coincidence of the name aside, it appears to be a legit bricks and mortar university in a town called Elon, North Carolina.
Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
This is hard to quantify. I use them constantly throughout my work day now.
Are they smarter than me? I'm not sure. Haven't thought too much about it.
What they certainly are, and by a long shot, is faster. Given a set of data, I could analyze it and pull out insights and conclusions. It might take me a week or a month depending on the size and breadth of the data set. An LLM can pull out insights and conclusions in seconds.
I can read error stacks coming from my code, but before I've even read the first few lines the LLM has ingested all of them, checked the code, and reached a conclusion about the necessary fix. Is it right, optimal, and avoid creating other bugs? Like 75% at this point. I can coax it, interate on the solution my self, or do it entirely myself with the understanding of the bug that it granted me. This same bug might have taken hours to figure out myself.
My point is, I'm not sure how to compare smarter vs orders of magnitude faster.
Are you smarter than a calculator?
