“Edging bets” sounds like a fun game, but I think you mean “hedging bets”, in which case you’re admitting we can’t actually do this reliably with people.

And we certainly can’t do that with an LLM, which doesn’t actually think.

What does this have to do with AI and with what OP said? Their point was obviously about limitations of the software, not some lament about critical thinking

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The problem with these hallucinated answers that makes them such a sensational story is that they are obviously wrong to virtually anyone. Your uncle on facebook who thinks the earth is flat immediately knows not to put glue on pizza. It’s obvious. The same way It’s obvious when hands are wrong in an image or someone’s hair is also the background foliage. We know why that’s wrong; the machine can’t know anything.

Similarly, as “bad” as human drivers are we don’t get flummoxed because you put a traffic cone on the hood, and we don’t just drive into tue sides of trucks because they have sky blue liveries. We don’t just plow through pedestrians because we decided the person that is clearly standing there just didn’t matter. Or at least, that’s a distinct aberration.

Driving is a constant stream of judgement calls, and humans can make those calls because they understand that a human is more important than a traffic cone. An autonomous system cannot understand that distinction. This kind of problem crops up all the time, and it’s why there is currently no such thing as an unsupervised autonomous vehicle system. Even Waymo is just doing a trick with remote supervision.

Despite the promises of “lower rates of crashes”, we haven’t actually seen that happen, and there’s no indication that they’re really getting better.

Sorry but if your takeaway from the idea that even humans aren’t great at this task is that AI is getting close then I think you need to re-read some of the batshit insane things it’s saying. It is on an entirely different level of wrong.

Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…

Genuine question: do you know that’s what happened? This type of implementation can suggest things like this without it having to be in the training data in that format.

No, it’s simply contradicting the claim that it is possible.

We literally don’t know how to fix it. We can put on bandaids, like training on “better” data and fine-tune it to say “I don’t know” half the time. But the fundamental problem is simply not solved yet.

only return results for a specific set of topics.

This is true, but when we’re talking about something that limited you’ll probably get better results with less work by using human-curated answers rather than generating a reply with an LLM.

Are you talking about epistemics in general or alethiology in particular?

Regardless, the deep philosophical concerns aren’t really germain to the practical issue of just getting people to stop falling for obvious misinformation or people being wantonly disingenuous to score points in the most consequential game of numbers-go-up.

You can train an LLM on the best possible set of data without a single false statement and it will still hallucinate. And there’s nothing to be done against that.

Without understanding of the context everything can be true or false.

“The acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9.81m/s2” True or False?

LLM basically works like this: given the previous words written and their order, the most probable next word of the sentence is this one.

The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it’s combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.

Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead?

A new religion

No. another type of ML algorithm could, but not an LLM. They do not work like that.

It’s better than not doing anything and pretending it’s all accurate.

It’s also useful because it gives a corporate controlled filter for all information, that most people will never truly appreciate is being used as a mouthpiece.

The end goal of this is fairly obvious: imagine Google where instead of the sponsored result and all subsequent results, it’s just the sponsored result.

similarly i’m tired of apple fanboys pretending the company hasn’t gotten dramatically worse since jobs died as well. yeah he sucked in his own ways but things were starkly less shitty and belittling. tim cook would be gone for those fucking lightning-3.5mm dongles

And after the MBA’s, private equity firms take over, and eventually it’s sold for parts.

Hallucinations aren’t fixable, as LLMs don’t have any actual “intelligence”. They can’t test/evaluate things to determine if what they say is true, so there is no way to correct it. At the end of the day, they are intermixing all the data they “know” to give the best answer, without being able to test their answers LLMs can’t vet what they say.

Even saying they’re guessing is wrong, as that implies intention. LLMs aren’t trying to give an answer, let alone a correct answer. They just put words together.

They’re not threatened by its potential. They, like artists, are threatened by management who think that LLMs are good enough today to replace part or all of their staff.

There was a story from earlier this year of a company that owns 12-15 different gaming news outlets who fired about 80% of their writing staff and journalists - replacing 100% of their staff at the majority of the outlets with LLMs and leaving a skeleton crew at the rest.

What you’re seeing isn’t some slant trying to discredit LLMs. It’s the results of management who are using them wrong.

He’s done a great job nosediving Google too. I have relied on them in the past but they stopped being competitive or improving. Search results, literally their origin… Is so shit now. I’ve moved to other tools. I pulled the plug on we hosting after they neutered ‘unlimited’ storage, even if I was in the percent which probably used the least storage. I just liked having the option. You can’t call them on the phone. They don’t protect email privacy. Their translate used to be my go to also. It’s not improved in years despite people crowdsourcing improved translation. It’s just a pile of enshittified crap. Worse than it was before.

Honestly the internet has ruined us. Dont threaten me with a good time.

The Internet immediately worked, which is one big difference. The dot com financial bubble has nothing to do with the functionality of the internet.

In this case, there is both a financial bubble, and a “product” that doesn’t really work, and which they can’t make any better (as he admits in this article.)

It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary. We are still trying to figure out what the real uses for LLM are. There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people’s work, but it doesn’t appear to be any kind of revolutionary technology.

Genuinely curious, what pieces do you suggest we can keep from LLM/GenAI/etc?

If you don’t know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won’t refine your search. You’ll just accept the bad answer and move on.

Your logic doesn’t follow. If someone doesn’t know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won’t be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?

I don’t believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.

I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that’s not what most people expect from a search engine.

I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.

Oh don’t get me wrong I know exactly what you mean and I agree… it’s just that the LLMs are spewing actual nonsense and that breaks the whole principle of what a search engine should do… provide me accurate results.

That is actually a really good observation.

Can you come up with any rational explanation as to why they would do that?

Is that the city over by Angelfire?

Theyre making a reference to stackoverflow.com, a website for IT/programming related questions. On that site moderators will typically lock (prevent updates on) new posts as they appear to be duplicates of existing questions/posts.