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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

We really need a class, probably in high school, that works through how LLMs work at the high level (don't need to get too far into the deep math, but give people a taste) and then how they're trained, used, and deployed.

I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data." (Unless it's stored in the cloud but encrypted locally with keys only you possess.) Same goes for storing things unencrypted in OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. There is nothing to stop these companies from bulk scanning, data mining, or reporting people based on whatever request a government gives them. Don't count on them to resist, because they often can't, especially if the request is from a sovereign state where they do business.

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You can make a reasonable case for adding a lot more classes in high school: statistics, nutrition, personal finance, etc. But ultimately it's a zero-sum game and to add a new class means removing an existing class. So what do we cut?

My kids' high school covers those topics. And I think that is not a new thing, I specifically remember taking the required personal finance class 35 years ago (great teacher -- crotchety old man who wrote "compound interest" on the blackboard every single day before class and repeatedly proclaimed that if we forgot everything else he taught, please try to remember how compound interest works).

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions

Assuming you consider it a "delusion" to have a p(doom) of more than 5% or so, that's not uncommon among frontier lab employees who have a pretty good idea of how LLMs work.

Indeed, I don't see how knowing the details of how LLMs work (which I know btw) would change anything about how intelligent they are. I only need to know that it's a computer program that writes stories, solves math problems and seduces people.

> There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Um, this is coming from the researchers building these models. So, good luck?

>We really need a class, probably in high school, that works through how LLMs work at the high level (don't need to get too far into the deep math, but give people a taste) and then how they're trained, used, and deployed

Not applicable.

If the woman was chatting to a local LLM, there would be no way to charge her for a goddamn thought crime.

Which is what the government did here, with Anthropic's assistance.

Thinking about committing a crime isn't a crime.

As for treating the "threat" as "public".. something tells me if the court ordered to share something publicly, telling it to a chatbot would not count.

>Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data"

Rrrright, because it's so easy for people to know when stuff from their computer is transmitted to not their computer.

There's nothing physically stopping those companies from scanning data on your computer either.

And legally, surely the state that treats convo with a chatbot as public when it suits them would prosecute mega corps for overly thorough telemetry when it also suits them, right?

Why people here accept this as normal is beyond me.

>I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There are people with education here that don't fare much better, so I don't know.

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