• Norgur@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    It’s almost as if the LLMs that got hyped to the moon and back are just word calculators doing stochastic calculations one word at a time… Oh wait…

    No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

      This is the danger though.

      If “boomers” are making the mistake of thinking that AI is capable of great things, “zoomers” are making the mistake of thinking society is built on anything more than some very simple beliefs in a lot of stupid people, and all it takes to make society collapse is to convince a few of these stupid people that their ideas are any good.

      • cannache@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        I disagree with the last part. Society and it’s many systems is pretty hard to collapse even if you managed to drug a huge portion of the population, gave them guns and fed them propaganda. Now imagine throwing heaps of people into jail like in Czech, still standing just more useless. Just look at portions of the middle east. The majority of people just get good at being lazy and defer accountability to the most violent assholes who then become dictators, the rest of society then selectively breeds the “dictators”.

        If this sounds dystopic consider that what you said lead to what this comment is, which is dumb. Now which is dumber?

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      A little reductive.

      We use CoPilot at work and whilst it isn’t doing my job for me, it’s saving me a lot of time. Think of it like Intellisense, but better.

      If my senior engineer, who I seem like a toddler when compared to can find it useful and foot the bill for it, then it certainly has value.

      • Norgur@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        It’s not reductive. It’s absolutely how those LLMs work. The fact that it’s good at guessing as long as your inputs follow a pattern only underlines that.

        • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

          This is the part of your comment is reductive. The first part just explains how LLMs work, albeit sarcastically.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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          11 months ago

          If it was only guessing, it would never be able to create a single functioning program. Which it has, numerously.

          This isn’t some infinite monkeys on typewriter stuff.

          It writes and can check itself if it is correct.

          I’ve seen ChatGPT write an entire Website in Wordpress, including setting up a MySQL database for users, by a user stating their wishes vocally in a microphone and then not touching the computer once.

          How is that guessing?

          • Norgur@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            No, it does not “check itself”. You mixed up “completely random guesses” and stochastically calculated guesses… ChatGPT has.an obscenely large corpus of training data that was further refined by a blatant disregard for copyright and tons and tons of exploited workers in low wage countries, right?

            So imagine the topic “setup Wordpress”. ChatGPT has just about every article indexed that’s on the internet about this. Word for word. So it’s able to assign a number to each word and calculate the probability of each word following every other word it scanned. Since WordPress follows a very clear pattern as to how it’s set up, those probabilities will be very clear cut.
            The details the user entered can be stitched in because ChatGPT can very easily detect variables given the huge amount of data. Imagine a CREATE USER MySQL command. ChatGPTs sources will be almost identical up until it comes to the username which suddenly leads to a drop on certainty regarding the next Word. So there’s your variable. Now stitch in the word the user typed after the word “User” and bobs your uncle.

            ChatGPT can “write programs” because programming (just as human language) follows clear patterns that become pretty distinct if the amount of data you analyze becomes large enough.

            ChatGPT does not check anything it spurts out. It just generates a word and calculates which word is most likely to follow that one.

            It only knows which sources of it’s training data it should xluse because those were sorted and categorized by humans slaving away in Africa and Asia, doing all the categories by hand.

    • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

      Ehh, I use NovelAI, and it kind of turns writing into an interactive CYOA game. If I get stuck in a scene and I dunno what to put next, I’ll have a character say or do something, and let the AI go “yeah! And—” like a good improv partner in my voice.

      But it’s not a “discussion” or instruct model, so it’s slightly less stupid. Except when it gets written facts wrong that are active in the lorebook and memory, and it ignores them.