Tobold's Blog
Friday, November 08, 2024
 
A better parrot, or why there isn't a Tobold.AI

Henry Ford did not say that his customers only wanted better horses, although you might have seen that quote on the slide of some marketing consultant. But the story of the inventor actually delivering something far more powerful than his customers wanted is a popular one in circles that work on research and development. It hides the far more frequent and mundane reality of inventors delivering something far weaker than customers wanted. Right now, many people strongly believe in the power of AI, but all that large language models like ChatGPT can deliver is a better parrot.

Today I saw (but refuse to honor with a link) a YouTube video using ChatGPT to predict Trump's first 100 day in office "and it is worse than you imagined". No, actually that ChatGPT prediction is exactly as bad as people imagined. Because all that ChatGPT does is take all the fantasies from people who wrote about that subject on the internet and regurgitates them. You get both the horror visions from the left, and the crazy power fantasies from the right, mix them together and get an "AI prediction". Which is complete nonsense.

I was struck by that AI prediction approach, because it is diametrically opposed to my previous post. In that I had looked at various election promises and fears, and subjected them to a reality check. It is exactly that reality check that AI is unable to provide. Large language models repeat language they heard, they can't reason, and thus can't contradict. If I created an Tobold.AI to write my blog posts, it could only tell you what everybody is saying. It couldn't tell you why that might possibly be wrong.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
I'm sure you know that's not how LLMs work. In fact, no-one knows how they work, not even the people who created them. There's constant research taking place trying to figure out how it is they do what they do. I recommend this article for a basic overview of the complexity involved.

https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

Whatever they're doing, though, they're certainly not just "repeating language they heard" and they most definitely can reason.
# posted by Blogger Bhagpuss : 8/11/24 10:41
 
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