• huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    16 hours ago

    because the snake oil salesmen keep telling us it’s great and improved and keep gobbling up larger and larger proportions of EVERYTHING to run their hallucination machines.

    • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      16 hours ago

      They’re not talking about how great it is at counting letters. This is just using a technology for something it wasn’t meant for and then going on about how it’s useless. If you want to disprove the hype, using evidence that hadn’t been known for the entire production run of commercial LLMs would probably be better.

      • Nacarbac [any]@hexbear.net
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        12 hours ago

        If it cannot be used for something it wasn’t intended, then it isn’t intelligence. And since language processing is both what it is made from and intended for, this shows that there is no emergent intelligent understanding of its actual speciality function, it’s just a highly refined autocomplete with some bolted-on extras.

        Not that more research couldn’t necessarily find that mysterious theoretical threshold, but the focus on public-facing implementations and mass application is inefficient to the point of worthlessness for legitimate improvement. Good for killing people and disrupting things though.

        • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          12 hours ago

          If it cannot be used for something it wasn’t intended, then it isn’t intelligence.

          no shit. death to ad men. but LLMs aren’t for most of these stunts. that’s part of the problem but it’s like saying my bike is bad at climbing trees. at least the bike isn’t being advertised for arbory

          • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            10 hours ago

            But what is it for? Other than be a bottomless pit for resources.

            It does seem cultish to present the thinking machine but when it is presented with easily verifiable tasks it regularly completely shits the bed but we are supposed to blindly trust it with more complicated matters that aren’t easily verified.

      • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        13 hours ago

        It sucks at other things too. Counting errors are just really easy to objectively verify.

        People like Altman claim they can use LLM for creating formal proofs, advancing our knowledge of physics and shit. Fat chance when it can’t even compete with a toddler at counting.