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1. Embed this notice
   Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx: (njoseph@social.masto.host)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 12:55:49 JST Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:

   Some thoughts about LLMs

   1. "LLMs confidently give wrong answers/lies" - anybody who tried to get information from an LLM.

   LLMs have no feelings or emotions. So, they cannot "feel confident". We perceive their lack of doubt to be confidence.

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   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 12:55:36 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     • Baldur Bjarnason

     @njoseph The mention of astrology & LLMs in the same toot brought my mind to @baldur 's blogpost providing a theory as to why so many people find them so convincing: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

   • Embed this notice
     Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx: (njoseph@social.masto.host)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 12:55:40 JST Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:

     in reply to

     3. "When the LLM made up some stuff you didn't like, it was a hallucination" - Sam Altman probably?

     LLMs cannot think. Also, they had no sense organs until they recently became multi-modal. They have no sense of right/wrong/meaning/nonsense etc. All of that comes from the human interpreting the signals coming from the LLM. Does this make their users computer astrologers? It doesn't matter. Like a stopped clock, they are sometimes right and can do novel things so people keep using them.

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   • Embed this notice
     Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx: (njoseph@social.masto.host)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 12:55:44 JST Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:

     in reply to

     2. "The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent" - from a recently popular toot.

     The main ability of LLMs is to place token after token (a token is a part of a word) very quickly. To speak is to transform your thoughts into a form that others can understand. LLMs have no thoughts. Heck, they don't even understand words because they deal in tokens. Jar Jar Binks actually meets this definition of intelligence.

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   • Embed this notice
     Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx: (njoseph@social.masto.host)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 23:51:51 JST Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:

     in reply to

     • alcinnz
     • Baldur Bjarnason

     @alcinnz It's possible I've read some of @baldur 's writing last year and this influenced my understanding of LLMs. Also, the "stochastic parrots" paper.

     I wasn't aware that Baldur wrote an entire book on this subject. "The Intelligence Illusion" is such a perfect title. That's what I would've called it too.