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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • LLMs process information

    No, they don’t. They merely tell you which sequence of characters comes most often in their training set after the sequence of characters you gave them. That’s all. No processing going on, no information being generated or retrieved other than statistical trivia about their training set.

    AI can be extremely dangerous in either case. LLMs are no different from that perspective.

    General AI could be dangerous because it could be smarter than us while having interests, objectives, and morals that could clash with our own, causing it to antagonise us.

    That’s obviously impossible for LLMs, which have as much intelligence, interests, objectives, or morals as your average paperweight.

    LLMs are dangerous because they’re good enough at sounding like they know what they’re saying that you people actually believe them to be intelligent (and the fact that the bastards selling them are using their apparent intelligence as their main selling point obviously doesn’t help either), and they can be convincing enough that when they randomly tell you to get a bleach and ammonia enema to help with that headache you might actually believe them since by that point there’ll be no way left to check your facts. Which, hey, fair enough, natural selection and all that… but at some point one of you is going to fart that chlorine gas in my general vicinity, and that isn’t so good.


  • There’s nothing resembling intelligence, general or not, in any autocorrect implementation so far, including LLMs.

    LLMs don’t make mistakes. If you think they do, you’re completely misunderstanding what LLMs are, how they work, and what they do (probably because of the aforementioned misinformation by LLM peddlers trying to equate them to intelligence, artificial or not).

    LLMs simply give you the most statistically likely word to follow a given text. Then they do it again, adding the word they generated in the previous cycle to the text. That’s all they do, they’re excellent at it, and they don’t make mistakes, the word they output will be the most statistically likely, regardless of whether it makes sense or not (though attempts by their peddlers to keep them politically correct might cause them to discard the first several most likely words, leaving them able to only output a significantly unlikely — but hopefully politically correct — one, which might seem like a mistake to the user).

    You seem to be assuming that LLMs are trained on knowledge. They’re not. They’re trained on text. They have no idea what the text means (they don’t even have anything to have ideas with), and they don’t care (nor have more ability to care than a desk lamp).

    They have a model of what words (meaning sequences of characters, not concepts with any actual meaning) may come after certain others, they push the input sequence of meaningless characters through that model, and out comes the most statistically likely meaningless sequence of characters to follow said text. That’s all.

    Paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, “LLMs don’t produce information. They produce information shaped sentences.”

    They produce the dessicated corpses of the texts they were fed, shredded and put back together, drained of any actual information but indistinguishable enough from texts containing actual information to give the illusion of also containing it.

    They’re great as an alternative to lorem ipsum, or possibly as speech generators for non quest critical NPCs in games, but they’re extremely dangerous for anything else, especially the uses LLM peddlers are peddling them for.







  • Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).

    Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).