Technology

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are spread to be "information professionals". If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don't know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

They're right

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

I'm 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I'm not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.

LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.

LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent

There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.

While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.

Am American.

....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

Think of a person with the most average intelligence and realize that 50% of people are dumber than that.

These people vote. These people think billionaires are their friends and will save them. Gods help us.

Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are... or they're dumb enough to be correct.

The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.

LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.

It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses

"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.

An llm simply has remembered facts. If that is smart, then sure, no human can compete.

Now ask an llm to build a house. Oh shit, no legs and cant walk. A human can walk without thinking about it even.

In the future though, there will be robots who can build houses using AI models to learn from. But not in a long time.