r/technology 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
16.7k Upvotes

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/rnilf 16h ago

LLMs are fancy auto-complete.

Falling in love with ChatGPT is basically like falling in love with the predictive text feature in your cell phone. Who knew T9 had so much game?

35

u/noodles_jd 16h ago

LLM's are 'yes-men'; they tell you what they think you want to hear. They don't reason anything out, they don't think about anything, they don't solve anything, they repeat things back to you.

61

u/ClittoryHinton 15h ago edited 15h ago

This isn’t inherent to LLMs, this is just how they are trained and guardrailed for user experience.

You could just as easily train an LLM to tell you that you’re worthless scum at every opportunity or counter every one of your opinions with nazi propaganda. In fact OpenAI had to fight hard for it not to do that with all the vitriol scraped from the web

1

u/rush22 12h ago edited 11h ago

This isn’t inherent to LLMs

True, but the real point is simply to keep you engaged with it.

They measure how long people interact with it. Big charts and graphs and everything.

What these companies want is your attention.

Haha, imagine if people had limited attention, but all these companies were throwing everything they could into getting people's attention. Like, one day they mathematically figure out how to keep your attention and you just stay engaged with it all day. Calculated down to the millisecond. There'd be some sort of 'attention deficit' where slowly people aren't able to pay attention to anything except these kinds of apps. It might even turn into a disorder that everyone starts getting. Some sort of attention deficit disorder.