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Some thoughts about LLMs
1. "LLMs confidently give wrong answers/lies" - anybody who tried to get information from an LLM.
LLMs have no feelings or emotions. So, they cannot "feel confident". We perceive their lack of doubt to be confidence.
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2. "The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent" - from a recently popular toot.
The main ability of LLMs is to place token after token (a token is a part of a word) very quickly. To speak is to transform your thoughts into a form that others can understand. LLMs have no thoughts. Heck, they don't even understand words because they deal in tokens. Jar Jar Binks actually meets this definition of intelligence.
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3. "When the LLM made up some stuff you didn't like, it was a hallucination" - Sam Altman probably?
LLMs cannot think. Also, they had no sense organs until they recently became multi-modal. They have no sense of right/wrong/meaning/nonsense etc. All of that comes from the human interpreting the signals coming from the LLM. Does this make their users computer astrologers? It doesn't matter. Like a stopped clock, they are sometimes right and can do novel things so people keep using them.
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@njoseph The mention of astrology & LLMs in the same toot brought my mind to @baldur 's blogpost providing a theory as to why so many people find them so convincing: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
@alcinnz It's possible I've read some of @baldur 's writing last year and this influenced my understanding of LLMs. Also, the "stochastic parrots" paper.
I wasn't aware that Baldur wrote an entire book on this subject. "The Intelligence Illusion" is such a perfect title. That's what I would've called it too.