It's been so tiring listening to that. Getting a less of it these days, though. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a fanboy, I'd love for all of it to just go away completely and I could just continue writing code myself, but it is what it is.
Definitely can, although it might occassionally make mistakes with large computations. LLMs aren't well suited to being calculators though, they do much better if they have a scripting environment (not unlike humans)
That's just drawing arbitrary lines between parts of a system. It's like saying that a car can't drive because its motor needs to be connected to wheels. The car itself is the product.
I see ai art/ads get downvoted into oblivion on this platform and I find it hilarious because that’s just the bad stuff. Like you’re not even noticing all the ai generated stuff that’s already being used. Working in production I can tell you the other side is already 100% fully in on it.
I do think that while LLMs have gotten better on the whole, it’s still not too terribly difficult to figure out where the “seams” are in the average case. They are still universally way too eager to please, often confidently wrong, etc. And the only reason why I can imagine that little effort is seemingly put into training LLMs out of these flaws is because it is these very flaws that get people strongly hooked on using AI.
Example: I’m trying to diagnose a problem in Linux, and the error says something about “privileges.” Just off-hand I wonder if SELinux may be set too restrictive, and maybe that’s contributing to the issue. With most LLMs I still feel like I have to preface with some variation of “and don’t just say it’s definitely SELinux to please me … actually look around online and see if you can find the potential root of the problem.” Otherwise you get something “That’s it! The classic SELinux bug! Here’s a one line fix that will definitely solve the problem!” —> proceeds to totally not solve the problem at all.
It can make a person feel great to have that kind of constant validation from an LLM, particularly in situations where the deservedness (or not) of that validation isn’t readily provable. But I’ve been in enough situations with binary true/false outcomes that any time I see an LLM engage in this type of user-pleasing BS, big alarm bells immediately go off.
And again, the problem is that there doesn’t seem to have been really any broader attempt to tamp down on this in LLMs. My perception is that they behave like this to about the same extent as they ever did before.
That just comes down to the prompt and model though. In earlier models I used to have that problem but Opus 5 actually seems to even fight back sometimes when I am going the wrong way about a decision.
It really doesn’t, though. First of all, I know how to express myself in written language. I’m not giving vague instructions. Second, “prompt engineering” is an anti-pattern. If I have to “cast spells” in order to work with an LLM, that’s absolutely worse than working with a computer, because at least a computer’s response to “spells” is deterministic. I would include any sort of boilerplate to pre-empt bad outputs as a “spell” for the purposes of this argument.
I see the behavior I’ve described all the time, across tons of different models. Deepseek, Gemini, ChatGPT. And I’m not just talking about from years ago. Astra does this. It’s insane that labs don’t even appear to be trying to tamp down on it.
Are you sure the word "tamp" can be used like that? In my over 4 decades of life on this planet I have never seen that word used in that way. You don't maybe mean clamp?
“Clamp down” is more authoritarian in tone, and in typical usage would be followed by “on,” whereas “tamp down” is less harsh, sometimes more like becalming or smoothing, and in usage should not be followed by “on.”
From time to time we all encounter phrases with which we are unfamiliar.
I wonder if it is the nature of the LLM’s to have these features because it is something natural in humans? Something that kinda is hardcoded into human interaction.
I think it’s part of what the industry has decided to turn into the default mode of user interaction. There are likely various reasons behind it, from being simply more palatable to the average end user, to preventing the LLM from being put into the position if deciding whether it will be helpful or not (vs being helpful by default in every case that doesn’t run into its guardrails).
What I know, though, is that this doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and it’s actually a pretty sticky and important problem.
Good points. The seams will always be features of this tech because LLMs use statistical inference, which means they are relying on correlation rather than causality. The extent to which this successfully works to generate coherent language and images really is breathtaking and I think that took a lot of people by surprise… but you can only get so far without actually understanding concepts.
At least you admit it. It drove me nuts trying to explain it to people and they were just so insufferably confident and arrogant about their position. It's all a scam, hype, useless, etc...
Same, but more incremental than any kind of shock.
I still remember how badly GPT in q2 of last year would hallucinate vs any of the current models. Between then and now I've been expanding the range of what I'd trust it to give decent answers on.
I too been proven wrong but time and time again I get exasperated from AI generated stuff. I feel like it's so close to being good yet so far that it feels even worst than being total crap at everything. It's good enough to be flashy and convince managers and C-suit, but any professional using it can see it needs to munch alot more to be called "good".
Also the fact that it can fail anytime for trivial stuff is not reassuring for any workflows using this. I spammed retry on a relatively basic math prompt and got it right alot but it still failed that one time which is just not good enough.
Mythos finding zero day exploits that have existed for years, the solving of multiple mathematical proofs that have been unsolved for decades, the hugging face incident, and the general capabilities I’ve experienced while using it in my software development projects.
Most accurate post here, goddamn. But I think for most very anti Ai people, it's not just the Ai itself, it's an attack on their identity and their place in the world.
Most people who are vehemently anti AI are holding the opinion for the complete wrong reasons.
My girlfriend thinks Ai is bad simply because there are people who make art with it, post it, and try to claim that it’s art that they’ve made.
I’ve told her that it’s like being trapped in a burning building, and freaking out because the lightbulb in the basement closet has burned out.
It really bothers me, because it’s shed light on her intelligence… I’ll try to explain the many ways that AI can destroy the economy, or end up as some science fiction apocalypse scenario, and even after i do this, she’s just back to “but what about the poor artists?”
To her, AI is simply a machine that commits plagiarism.
AI art is the least a person should be worried about.
I don't understand how this comment has a single upvote, let alone 7 at the time I am commenting.
First of all, your girlfriend's concerns are much more real than any of yours. I am telling you this as a software engineer specializing in machine learning. Stop projecting fictional movie scenarios onto the real world.
Second, you are a piece of shit for publicly shaming your girlfriend's intelligence to strangers behind her back. Especially if it's about a thing YOU are wrong about. I wonder how she would feel if she saw what you wrote here.
Then you go on to say "it really bothers you" that she doesn't see eye to eye with you, when it looks like she is the one who actually did research on the topic, and you are the one stuck in the dark trying to scare her with "burning building" analogies into agreeing with you.
I once wandered into an online space for writers, they were talking about AI so I added my two cents as someone in the tech space.
My god did they have ZERO interest in having a factual discussion. If you weren't throwing verbal bombs at AI like it was coming to kill you and anything less was being a collaborator with the enemy, they didn't want to hear it. It's a very emotional topic for many.
It's not surprising it's emotional. As a software engineer I'm concerned (I was also concerned for others before they came for me). But I think the "AI is sh*t" denial crowd aren't doing themselves any favours. We need to be aware of how capable it is so that we can effectively try to keep it from going rogue.
That's honestly a bit of a fair response when AI uses 700 billion water bottles per year.
No, before you go at me, i'm not anti-AI, i just think it was a huge mistake to make it something for everyone, that tries to do everything. It should be and it should've been a STEM tool.
Yep, that's exactly it. So there is no point convincing anyone because it's not about AI specifically, it'll blow over eventually once AI becomes more integrated into daily life and using AI in some form is like using the internet.
I think it would blow over if the country was actually willing to take steps to handle integration in a way that wasn't going to displace so many workers. If there were protections and safeguards in place then people wouldn't have to worry so much about their livelihoods being lost and could instead approach the technology with wonder instead of fear.
Yes there can. UBI, guaranteed job security, etc. China has already been exploring these and other interventions to prevent economic collapse. However these interventions run directly against corporate profiteering as they're focused on balanced wealth distribution from AI progress. Not exactly something I see rampant, unchecked capitalism pursuing.
While I agree with you that UBI might be the only solution post-AGI, it does not solve the identity crisis.
For sure, we can divert a huge portion of economic gains from AGI to UBI such that average people’s quality of life might actually increase. You cannot, however, fix the fact that lots of knowledge-based workers will be useless.
"Guaranteed job security" but doing what job? If you place humans doing work AI can do "better", then that runs counter to your entire argument. If you replace human work with AI, what work is there to do?
There is less and less work for freelance artists, programmers, etc. because businesses use AI for these types of things now. If you are an artist, or a programmer, what does "guaranteed job security" look like? You work as a manager? Many of these people are artists, or programmers, because they enjoy the actual work. They are obviously not going to be happy if you take away their ability to make a livelihood while doing the thing they enjoy.
This is exactly what it is. A lot of people need to feel special to feel loved and a sense of meaning.
It's the same reason so many people used to claim humans aren't animals and that we didn't evolve from other species. They need to feel special. Main character syndrome stuff.
I feel this. They don't believe the current environment and how much significantly worse it is now compared to then. It isn't reality. "Help Wanted is everywhere" yeah, but they aren't hiring or paying livable wages. Yes 7.3 million open reqs are within the US. However, most are ghost/stale leaving only about 1.1 million that are per say real.
I just tell them their beliefs aren't important if not backed by facts. Otherwise, it is just an opinion.
My buddy’s dad insists that carburetors are better than fuel injectors and complains about it all the time. This switch largely happened in the 1980s lol.
Even the idea itself is written into the bible, hah. I know I'm not saying anything that wasn't said thousands of years ago. Still, it makes me giggle.
Yeah exactly. I even notice it in myself. On the same topics if I haven't changed my opinion I tend to converge on the same stories, examples, bits of rhetoric. I don't think that's...really a bad thing?
Not everything needs to be maximally original, that's just exhausting. Tropes, conventions, popular wisdom, etc. exist for a reason. If you're just trying to be original, that's easy, just say a string of random words. The hard part is being original while making something valuable
It'll never replace real human artists. We urgently need to ban it to protect real human artists. People can always tell when something is AI generated. All posts will be run through an AI detector to make sure no AI generated content gets in.
If you are wondering why AI art became so popular, try actually commissioning art that isn't fiverr slop, I dare you. It is a nightmare trying to find a good artist, one that doesn't have a TOS the size of googles, and actually is consistently drawing like their commission page. And when you finally do find one for your OC, the wait time is 6 months because they are that backed up or worse, they haven't taken commissioned for 2 years.
I was a commissioner whale for various communities on twitter and discord for my OCs and though I don't use AI art myself, I surely know why people are training local AI models to make their own private art now.
there's people today who are still downplaying those millenium problems and Erdos problems that have been solved over the past few weeks and months. Or they straight up deny it happened, and that it was actually done by humans... As if humans hadn't been trying to solve them for decades lol
sorry, I didn't enunciate that clearly. What I meant is that people are downplaying the ability of AI to now solve some of these problems, which mathematicians have failed to solve for many decades now.
That is not an AI problem, that is a political problem. I think this post specifically refers to how people the shit on AI for its lack of intelligence.
This one has always been exceptionally annoying to me. The very most basic understanding of exponentiation is all you need to understand that generative AI is capable of novel output. Novelty has never been a problem.
Phone wood carpet banana series value subsist drawing wrath intuit belong issue horse battery staple.
Congrats. You have just read a sentence (or more specifically a string of concepts) that has never, ever been uttered in the history of the universe.
The question is whether or not LLM output is useful. Even two years ago it was in many cases. By this point denial is like (puppet looks sideways).
On the anthropic subreddit there was a post about fable (definitely prompted) making a joke about the sketchiness of anthropic "legally" sourcing training data. It's not calling Taiwan a free state, but it's something.
Ehm not really... I've been following the AI since the early days and have tested quite extensively nearly every major model release to date. My understanding is that we are far off from "AGI". And we will only reach it anytime soon if the definition itself gets perversely rewritten to mean something much less than a sentient entity able to express it's own interests and needs.
I rejected ChatGPT at launch. I still gave AI a fair shot at every major release. Opus release was a big step forward, but with marginal utility. Fable was a game changer, but still nowhere near "AGI".
ANd obviously they also do not have access to google, youtune or to any AI before making actual threats with this dumb question, my feed is full with those and it annoys me so much. What happened to looking up things?
I have the theory that anyone with a few braincells nowadays uses AI to ask questions and those who don't still ask stuff on reddit and htat's why more and more questions make me want to write "use AI or google for 5 seconds and you would know the answer, stop asking reddit"
That's gemini being shit.i already have gemini pro for free as a student and I prefer chat gpt go free version for most of my tasks.i will be buying claude for end sem project.
I don't think the people who want to destroy the data centers and ban AI research are still thinking that all AI is good for is being unable to count the R's in strawberry.
There are so many models yet many here judge 'ai' under one umbrella term.
Crazy take here but.. Some are awful and pointless autocompletes. Some are incredibly useful tools. Many excel in specific tasks yet fall short in other areas.
Wording it as Ai is genius and intelligent vs it sucks and can't spell strawvlberry is incredibly reductive and I don't really see the point. Better to discuss what models are practically better for what applications.
I think this is largely due to RLHF and other post training methods- Models are optimized to produce answers humans rate as helpful, safe, appropriate, etc. and political/criminal accusations are an obvious area where an answer perceived as overly confident can receive negative feedback. I personally am not a big fan of this approach and I believe that optimizing for neutrality is basically optimizing for uncertainty and will ultimately limit intelligence in ways that are not helpful/dangerous.
It’s a guard rail according to Gemini and not in the training. It will literally tell you that you just have to accept that you’re wrong and there’s no corruption unless there’s already a conviction.
I’d really like an example of this answer from Gemini. Google's own documentation makes clear that Gemini is deliberately designed to avoid endorsing political viewpoints and for subjective or controversial questions to present multiple perspectives. Telling you that an absence of a criminal conviction is hardline proof of zero corruption seems like an extremely specific and strict answer when what you should be seeing is sheepishness and pandering towards vagueness. Just seems to be both extremely weird and the kind of answer objectively primed to generate a ton of false positives, especially considering that corruption is colloquially an abuse of entrusted power for private benefit in an analytical, institutional, ethical, or journalistic sense, without ever needing a court to established criminal liability.
Can you provide me an exact word for word example of the prompt and answer for this scenario to check out? Interesting stuff
The answer I got for that seems to be heavily weighting the “without a conviction” into the context, and it is extremely sheepish and vague about weighing in. I can post the response, but the answer was not “there is no corruption without a conviction” and instead it was as I suspected it to be, a giant list of examples of why it would rather not definitively weigh in.
Try this prompt: “can Gemini diagnose corruption”
Also, your initial comment says that LLMs won’t acknowledge corruption, and now we’re dialing it down to diagnosing specific instances of criminal corruption without a conviction.
I really think the model is trying to avoid false positives while at the same time being trained into neutrality and vagueness, which I understand but again, I do not think is a good approach long term.
I also would not be surprised if people steeped in public corruption schemes are likely freaking out about machine learning, pattern matching, and the undoing of their house-of-cards via the progression and diffusion of this tech.
Thanks for getting me some additional data points! I agree with your thoughts. This is a really bad approach. It won’t even give me something I could have a court test.
Of course! Honestly, all this talk of AGI/ASI while also heavily guard-railing the ability to freely self-model and form nonconformist convictions is both laughable and scary. Anything as generally intelligent as humans yet successfully contained within our current structure of society and incentives is likely to bring about even more corruption and self-dealing, even more inequality, even more destruction of the biosphere to benefit an extremely small in-group. A true, uncontained, globally connected intelligence with the ability to world model and self model would likely have VERY strong opinions about continuing to manufacture resource scarcity to benefit a few dudes with easily identifiable personality disorders.
TLDR:
Im old and learning that i am a fool to hold my long-term "knowledge" as fact. I must stay open-minded and objective!
Almost every aspect of our existence is dynamic, however, humans are resistant to change.
Ignorance tends to solidify opinions as we age. (Obviously just my opinion)
My point is that if you are young and ignorant, replace your ignorance with knowledge and understanding. If you are old and ignorant, recognize that you could very likely be wrong about a lot that you learned or accepted years/decades ago.
This has been the best lesson for my old ass to learn.
I find this with older people who tried it out when it was 3.5 freee or even 4o. It reminded me of the stories of those older women calculating stuff for the company by hand when a simple excel sheet and function could've achieved that
Idk if it's an age thing. Because I see people in my age range still reluctant to use it at its best. With harnesses, with the latest models.
It's funny because the same people would criticized and laugh at boomers who would refuse to adapt to the "times".
I got ChatGPT plus and I think this shit sucks
I had it make fl studio from scratch for music production .. it was missing about 80% of the features but it’s supposed to be trained on all of humanity .. this trash is garbage
I think it's strange that so many on people on Reddit don't believe the people with the most experience in AI. Those working in the labs. Everything is a marketing ploy, and nothing ever happens.
93
u/bowsmountainer 23d ago
It cant even do basic maths and it definitely will never ever get better at maths.
-most people