• thejml@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I thought this was fake or a bad result or something, but totally just duplicated it. Wow.

    If you read the block of text…. It doesn’t make sense either.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      3 months ago

      I expect if you follow the references you’d find one of them to be one of those “if Earth was a grain of sand” analogies.

      People like laughing at AI but usually these silly-sounding answers accurately reflect the information the search returned.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        It’s in the quote that they scaled it.

        The point is that the entire alleged value is the ability to parse the reading material and extract the key points, but because it doesn’t resemble intelligence in any way, it isn’t actually capable of meaningfully doing so.

        Yes, not being able to distinguish between the real answer and a “banana for scale” analogy is a big problem that shows how fucking useless the technology is.

        • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 months ago

          It’s in the quote that they scaled it.

          Yes but they supposedly scaled it to “one meter per meter”. A “scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km” is the actual distance.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            lol I did miss that, but it was enough to make it not a guess that its source was scaling for comparison.

            My whole point was the same as your OP, though. A condom that’s 95% effective isn’t worth shit. You can’t let a toy without reading comprehension do your reading for you.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          *Dangerous! Don’t forget how dangerous it is — considering all tech bros and corps are acting as though LLM’s are on the verge of real intelligence, instead of being a stochastic parrot that’s essentially a mathematical magic trick.

          “Now watch as I, the great mathemagician, make a statistical algorithm appear to hold general intelligence!”

          Our “intelligence” agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots. The more LLM’s are integrated into our day to day lives, the more people will trust them and disregard their own logic, and the more dangerous they become.

          • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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            3 months ago

            Our “intelligence” agencies already kill innocent people based entirely on metadata — because they simply live or work around areas that known terrorists occupy — now imagine if an AI was calling the shots.

            So by your own scenario, intelligence agencies are already getting stuff wrong and making bad decisions using existing methodologies.

            Why do you assume that new methodologies that involve LLMs will be worse at that? Why could they not be better? Presumably they’re going to be evaluating their results when deciding whether to make extensive use of them.

            “Mathematical magic tricks” can turn out to be extremely useful. That phrase can be used to describe all manner of existing techniques that are undeniably foundational to civilization.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          Except it is capable of meaningfully doing so, just not in 100% of every conceivable situation. And those rare flubs are the ones that get spread around and laughed at, such as this example.

          There’s a nice phrase I commonly use, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” These AIs are good enough at this point that I find them to be very useful. Not perfect, of course, but they don’t have to be as long as you’re prepared for those occasions, like this one, where they give a wrong result. Like any tool you have some responsibility to know how to use it and what its capabilities are.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            No, it isn’t.

            You’re allowing a simple tool with literally zero reading comprehension to do your reading for you. It’s not surprising your understanding of what the tech is is lacking.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              3 months ago

              Your comment is simply counterfactual. I do indeed find LLMs to be useful. Saying “no you don’t!” Is frankly ridiculous.

              I’m a computer programmer. Not directly experienced with LLMs themselves, but I understand the technology around them and have written program that make use of them. I know what their capabilities and limitations are.

              • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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                3 months ago

                Your claim that it’s capable of doing what it claims isn’t just false.

                It’s an egregious, massively harmful lie, and repeating it is always extremely malicious and inexcusable behavior.

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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                  3 months ago

                  I have genuinely found LLMs to be useful in many contexts. I use them to brainstorm and flesh out ideas for tabletop roleplaying adventures, to write song lyrics, to write Python scripts to do various random tasks. I’ve talked with them to learn about stuff, and verified that they were correct by checking their references. LLMs are demonstrably capable of these things. I demonstrated it.

                  Go ahead and refrain from using them yourself if you really don’t want to, for whatever reason. But exclaiming “no it doesn’t!” In the face of them actually doing the things you say they don’t is just silly.

          • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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            3 months ago

            AIs are definitely not “good enough” to give correct answers to science questions. I’ve seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              3 months ago

              Then go ahead and put “science questions” into one of the areas that you don’t use LLMs for. That doesn’t make them useless in general.

              I would say that a more precise and specific restriction would be “they’re not good at questions involving numbers.” That’s narrower than “science questions” in general, they’re still pretty good at dealing with the concepts involved. LLMs aren’t good at math so don’t use them for math.

              • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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                3 months ago

                AI doesn’t seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.

    • gaterush@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I just tried and got “about 40,000 billion kilometers”. Also the references are completely different from the ones in the post, so I guess it was a ranking issue

      AI is just too unpredictable, hard to know what’s accurate and you end up doing the work yourself anyways

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      We should leave AI to the realm of producing fringe/impossible porn, like it was meant for and like what everyone actually wants from it. All this “search engine” stuff is just cover like when you buy some non-lube products like groceries along with the tube of astroglide at 1:00 AM.

    • miridius@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If you read the whole thing, it’s not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        What you’re referring to as “highlighting” here is what most of us consider the thing “answering the question”.

        “Where are you from?”

        “Connecticut. I was born and raised in Utah …”

        That first sentence is the answer to the question.

  • mercano@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

    • A_A@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 8.
      (…)
      ”Space,” it says, ”is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen . . . ” and so on.

      • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      Space is small. You just won’t believe how itsy, bitsy, mind-bogglingly tiny it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way to the fridge, but that’s just peanuts to space

      • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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        3 months ago

        Space is small.

        The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    3 months ago

    Like every tool, it has its uses…but they are not those being advertised. LLMs are great for things where mistakes don’t detract from the result (or even add to it) like brainstorming, art, music, disinformation…all that good stuff.

    • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      That’s what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don’t have right or wrong answers.

      Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?

      • contrefeu@akko.contref.eu
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        3 months ago

        @Gsus4 @btaf45 That’s true for AI that has been trained for the general public to provide an answer for any provided question meaning they are forced to respond to a prompt even though they are wrong and maybe even know they are wrong. They just don’t know the answer and can’t say that because it’s commercially bad.

        I do believe that for scientific research AI models are much more precise because they have been trained with the right datasets and are tasked with answering specific questions.

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah that’s why it would be very nice if they would stop integrating it into fucking search engines.

      • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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        3 months ago

        They wanna fucking integrate it in everything, dumbfucks. This is why meritocracy is dead, the people with the means to determine where we go as a society are “number go up” people.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      brainstorming

      Sure thing, but have to remember to include “no bad ideas” in the prompt for best results.

      • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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        3 months ago

        that’s the point of brainstorming, all ideas are allowed, filter later.

    • ulkesh@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      13.6km is 44,619ft.

      So nearly every time one flies commercial, yes, since cruising altitude is between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I think a large triple-star system would be quite visible at that point.

  • very_well_lost@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    In very next line, it says the distance is 4.37 lightyears away… which is also wrong, lol

    For anyone wondering, the actual correct answer is about 4.25 lightyears or about 40 trillion kilometers.

    • ulkesh@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I suspect there’s a quite-overlapping Venn diagram of people who rely on LLMs for their “facts” with people who believe the earth is flat and people who believe ancient aliens are real.

      • Ixoid@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        On display? I finally found them in the bottom of a locked filling cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the leopard”.

  • Squibbles@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    It’s measuring the distance to your nearest copy of Sid Myers alpha centari