Edit: Hey mod team. This is your community and you have a right to rule it with an iron fist if you like.
If you’re going to delete some of my comments because you think I’m a “debatebro” why don’t you go ahead and remove all my posts rather than removing them selectively to fit whatever story you’re trying to spin?
This is why actual AI researchers are so concerned about data quality.
Modern AIs need a ton of data and it needs to be good data. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
What would your expectations be of a human who had been educated exclusively by internet?
Even with good data, it doesn’t really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper…
To date, the largest working nuclear reactor constructed entirely of cheese is the 160 MWe Unit 1 reactor of the French nuclear plant École nationale de technologie supérieure (ENTS).
“That’s it! Gromit, we’ll make the reactor out of cheese!”
Honestly, no. What “AI” needs is people better understanding how it actually works. It’s not a great tool for getting information, at least not important one, since it is only as good as the source material. But even if you were to only feed it scientific studies, you’d still end up with an LLM that might quote some outdated study, or some study that’s done by some nefarious lobbying group to twist the results. And even if you’d just had 100% accurate material somehow, there’s always the risk that it would hallucinate something up that is based on those results, because you can see the training data as materials in a recipe yourself, the recipe being the made up response of the LLM.
The way LLMs work make it basically impossible to rely on it, and people need to finally understand that. If you want to use it for serious work, you always have to fact check it.
People need to realise what LLMs actually are. This is not AI, this is a user interface to a database. Instead of writing SQL queries and then parsing object output, you ask questions in your native language, they get converted into queries and then results from the database are converted back into human speech. That’s it, there’s no AI, there’s no magic.
We need to teach the AI critical thinking. Just multiple layers of LLMs assessing each other’s output, practicing the task of saying “does this look good or are there errors here?”
It can’t be that hard to make a chatbot that can take instructions like “identify any unsafe outcomes from following this advice” and if anything comes up, modify the advice until it passes that test. Have like ten LLMs each, in parallel, ask each thing. Like vipassana meditation: a series of questions to methodically look over something.
i can’t tell if this is a joke suggestion, so i will very briefly treat it as a serious one:
getting the machine to do critical thinking will require it to be able to think first. you can’t squeeze orange juice from a rock. putting word prediction engines side by side, on top of each other, or ass-to-mouth in some sort of token centipede, isn’t going to magically emerge the ability to determine which statements are reasonable and/or true
and if i get five contradictory answers from five LLMs on how to cure my COVID, and i decide to ignore the one telling me to inject bleach into my lungs, that’s me using my regular old intelligence to filter bad information, the same way i do when i research questions on the internet the old-fashioned way. the machine didn’t get smarter, i just have more bullshit to mentally toss out
It’s more a comment on how hard it is to separate truth from fiction. Adding glue to pizza is obviously dumb to any normal human. Sometimes the obviously dumb answer is actually the correct one though. Semmelweis’s contemporaries lambasted him for his stupid and obviously nonsensical claims about doctors contaminating pregnant women with “cadaveric particles” after performing autopsies.
Those were experts in the field and they were unable to guess the correctness of the claim. Why would we expect normal people or AIs to do better?
There may be a time when we can reasonably have such an expectation. I don’t think it will happen before we can give AIs training that’s as good as, or better, than what we give the most educated humans. Reading all of Reddit, doesn’t even come close to that.
Edit: Hey mod team. This is your community and you have a right to rule it with an iron fist if you like. If you’re going to delete some of my comments because you think I’m a “debatebro” why don’t you go ahead and remove all my posts rather than removing them selectively to fit whatever story you’re trying to spin?
This is why actual AI researchers are so concerned about data quality.
Modern AIs need a ton of data and it needs to be good data. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
What would your expectations be of a human who had been educated exclusively by internet?
Even with good data, it doesn’t really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper…
“That’s it! Gromit, we’ll make the reactor out of cheese!”
Of course it would be French
The first country that comes to my mind when thinking cheese is Switzerland.
Honestly, no. What “AI” needs is people better understanding how it actually works. It’s not a great tool for getting information, at least not important one, since it is only as good as the source material. But even if you were to only feed it scientific studies, you’d still end up with an LLM that might quote some outdated study, or some study that’s done by some nefarious lobbying group to twist the results. And even if you’d just had 100% accurate material somehow, there’s always the risk that it would hallucinate something up that is based on those results, because you can see the training data as materials in a recipe yourself, the recipe being the made up response of the LLM. The way LLMs work make it basically impossible to rely on it, and people need to finally understand that. If you want to use it for serious work, you always have to fact check it.
People need to realise what LLMs actually are. This is not AI, this is a user interface to a database. Instead of writing SQL queries and then parsing object output, you ask questions in your native language, they get converted into queries and then results from the database are converted back into human speech. That’s it, there’s no AI, there’s no magic.
christ. where do you people get this confidence
We need to teach the AI critical thinking. Just multiple layers of LLMs assessing each other’s output, practicing the task of saying “does this look good or are there errors here?”
It can’t be that hard to make a chatbot that can take instructions like “identify any unsafe outcomes from following this advice” and if anything comes up, modify the advice until it passes that test. Have like ten LLMs each, in parallel, ask each thing. Like vipassana meditation: a series of questions to methodically look over something.
i can’t tell if this is a joke suggestion, so i will very briefly treat it as a serious one:
getting the machine to do critical thinking will require it to be able to think first. you can’t squeeze orange juice from a rock. putting word prediction engines side by side, on top of each other, or ass-to-mouth in some sort of token centipede, isn’t going to magically emerge the ability to determine which statements are reasonable and/or true
and if i get five contradictory answers from five LLMs on how to cure my COVID, and i decide to ignore the one telling me to inject bleach into my lungs, that’s me using my regular old intelligence to filter bad information, the same way i do when i research questions on the internet the old-fashioned way. the machine didn’t get smarter, i just have more bullshit to mentally toss out
You’re assuming P!=NP
i prefer P=N!S, actually
Is this a dig at gen alpha/z?
Haha. Not specifically.
It’s more a comment on how hard it is to separate truth from fiction. Adding glue to pizza is obviously dumb to any normal human. Sometimes the obviously dumb answer is actually the correct one though. Semmelweis’s contemporaries lambasted him for his stupid and obviously nonsensical claims about doctors contaminating pregnant women with “cadaveric particles” after performing autopsies.
Those were experts in the field and they were unable to guess the correctness of the claim. Why would we expect normal people or AIs to do better?
There may be a time when we can reasonably have such an expectation. I don’t think it will happen before we can give AIs training that’s as good as, or better, than what we give the most educated humans. Reading all of Reddit, doesn’t even come close to that.