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Today's Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines
(quandyfactory.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology
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This reminds me of an article about journalism and the internet, from ages ago. A class was asked how they would research for a topic (it was some recent political event, I don’t remember). The class confidently answered “the internet.” The professor struggled to get them to understand that wasn’t enough. Yes, there is all kinds of stuff about this event on the internet, but how did it get there?. And more importantly, what is missing?
Sure, all the sexy AI stuff gives us goosebumps and sounds great. But how did it get there, and what is missing? Someone somewhere has to do the actual original work first, or it’s just making collages from the same library over and over and over again.
And also it's no replacement for actual research, either on the Internet or in real life.
People assume LLMs are like people, in that they won't simply spout bullshit if they can avoid it. But as this article properly points out, they can and do. You can't really trust anything they output. (At least not without verifying it all first.)
There are plenty of people who spout bullshit every chance they get.
As with any tool it is how you use it that matters.
Today’s LLM’s are capable of fairly amazing stuff.
It’s a BS machine? Sure. Have you read or written stuff for higher education?
You don’t get points for being short and concise, even though you should. You get points for following the BS formula.
You know who else is good at BS?
LLM’s. If you manage to provide it enough meaningful input it can do a great lot of BS legwork for you.
I see people who overuse it, don’t edit, isn’t critical. Sure. Then you end up with just BS.
But there’s plenty of useful applications, like writing boiler plate code (see also CoPilot), structuring code, tests, etc.
Is it worth all the hype? Nope.
Some of it? Probably.
Yeah definitely not saying it's not useful :) But it also doesn't do what people widely believe it does, so I think articles like this are helpful.