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Comment by thatjoeoverthr | Hacker News Reader

It’s really not like that. If I ask you to tell me about a geographical place I just made up, you can trivially and generally instantly recognize you don’t recognize it. A child can do this. You wouldn’t be able to hold a job or generally get through life without this level of self awareness.

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I had a great game as a kid where me and girls were playing for kisses on "words", i.e. "start the next word with the letter of the word I just said". So I invented a whole new vocabulary and then taught them that vocabulary. Apart from the fact that I got a lot of kisses from them they were so happy they learned something new they immediately went to share this with their (and my) parents. Obviously I got a slap but I just don't get how you can think "a kid can do this". You're either completely ignorant of different cultures (i.e. as an Eqstern European I still find it hard to remember Indian names, let alone tell if they are actually fucking with me) or intentionally simplifying the problem.

No, I’m referring to something else. Not the next word task. Being able to know whether you know something. Next time you encounter a child, ask them something they’re likely to be ignorant of, and see they’re able to say “I don’t know”.

But do you really know? Hence stuff like mansplaining where people vastly overestimate their knowledge compared to average Joe

Current frontier models are pretty good at telling you when they don't know something, or if you're asking about something nonexistent or nonsensical. Not always, but there has been massive improvement on this front lately.

If your last experience with frontier LLMs (read: not models that Google and ChatGPT are giving away for free, but models you have to pay for) was over a year ago, you may not realize that.

So can LLMs. I asked one about South Wollopop and it suggested that it'd never heard of it but maybe I meant South Wollo in Ethiopia. And that's just a local model with modest hardware and no internet access. First attempt.

I mean, if our position is that a hyper advanced statistical model is going to ultimately struggle with the concept of something being unlikely to be true then the statisticians may as well give up in despair. There is no theoretical obstacle here.

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