Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

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The "dumb" part comes from how it behaves in contexts where it lacks a lot of data, or where the data is skewed. Since they are tuned to give a prediction anyway and just make something up since sometimes those made up things are useful they will produce dumb results.

So people call them dumb since like dumb people they make strong statements about things they don't understand. And it doesn't matter how much smart things you encode them with, they will keep making strong statements about things they don't understand until they are fundamentally changed.

But since LLM are very smart about things where they have extensive data they can still be used to reliable solve many problems and probably in the future where we understand that better almost completely replace most lawyer and doctors work etc, because a lot of what a frontline doctor or basis lawyer work is very repetitive and can be encoded with billions of examples and decision paths into an expert system framework the LLM will follow.

So people say LLM are dumb since LLM will always keep making dumb statements. This is the same way we call Elon Musk dumb for making a lot of dumb statements, he is a smart guy but he makes dumb statements so her is dumb.

> they will keep making strong statements about things they don't understand until they are fundamentally changed

If ever there was a human quality.

Also, your explanation of "dumb" is really favoring the anti-llm side, and its a very generous interpretation. I suspect what is much more likely meant, is that token predictors cannot be smart, not now nor in the future after improvements, because they are token predictors and predicting tokens is not how intelligence works.

All of this is of course unfounded, and hidden behind the word "dumb".

> I suspect what is much more likely meant, is that token predictors cannot be smart, not now nor in the future after improvements, because they are token predictors and predicting tokens is not how intelligence works.

Why do you think that? LLM are used as expert systems today, in order to quickly navigate problems by breaking them down and iterating between different well known possible solutions and paths to check etc. That is how they work, they do that by using their next token predictions, and for things they aren't well trained on they will produce dumb results.

LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here, but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans. So its important to remind people these are just token predictors and lack many things humans do.

> If ever there was a human quality.

Humans can avoid doing that by using introspection, LLM can't. That some humans do it by not using introspection doesn't mean humans are incapable of it, we know humans are capable of it, which is why we can point out when the LLM is wrong with certainty, humans as a group make extremely good predictions.

> Why do you think that?

From (highly upvoted) parent:

> LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence > LLM-based “AI” ....

Hardly neutral statements, hardly accurate statements, yet highly upvoted. LLMs are AI, there is nothing to gain by pretending it isn't because of some secondary motive or opinion someone has.

> LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here

I think I have just shown you the parent literally claims LLMs are not AI, and do not possess intelligence.

> but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans.

I don't think many people think that, especially on HN, for two reasons:

1. Most high profile AI tools have immediately visible disclaimers saying, more or less, "AI makes mistakes". 2. People don't trust humans either, if anything people trust the AI more because it is not human.

People may be incorrectly worshipping LLMs, but they are doing it precisely because it is not human. If you put chatgpt behind a believable chatbox so people would actually think it was human, they would be much more skeptical.

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