Yeah, I am shocked people keep repeating this. We've seen LLMs easily writing mathematical proofs in the style of Shakespeare, come on.
If a LLM returned something really unusual for Shakespeare when you didn't ask for it, you'd say it's not performing well.
Maybe that's tautological but I think it's what's usually meant by "average".
I'm sure LLMs with something different is on the near horizon but I don't think we're there quite yet.
The point was that no, you wont (necessarily) get some "average" shakespeare. A sampler may introduce bias and look for the "above average" shakespeare in the distribution.
That’s why it’s repeated. It’s kind of correct if you squint and it’s easy to understand
Even very simple ones may require you to twist the definition of "correctness". I open a REPL and type "1/3.0*3.0" and get "0.9999999999". Then you have to do mental gymnastics like "actually it is a correct answer because arithmetic in computers is implemented not like you'd expect".
Exactly. The fact that language is fuzzy is why LLMs work so well.
The issue is that most people expect computers to not make mistakes. When you write a formula in an excel sheet, the computer doesn’t mess up the math.
The average non tech person knows that humans make mistakes, but are not used to computers making mistakes.
Many people, maybe most, would see an answer generated by a computer program and assume that it’s the correct answer to their question.
In pointing out that LLMs are guessing at what text to write (by saying “average”) you convey that idea in a simplified way.
Trying to argue that “correct” doesn’t mean anything isn’t really useful. You can replace the word “correct” with “practically correct” and nothing about what I said changes.
I don’t think people are dumb, just that the vast majority of people dont have knowledge of statistics and AI.
“Random” isn’t good either. Obviously the text gpt and other LLMs generate isn’t random.
Statistical works too, sure.
Sure, computers are better at arithmetic humans, but let's be honest, nobody uses chatgpt as a calculator. Last 20 years AI is getting everywhere, we keep laughing that sometimes AI systems make very obvious stupid mistakes. Now we finally have a system that makes subtle mistakes very confidently and suddenly people are like "I thought computers are never wrong". I can't fathom how anyone would expect that.
I don’t really think there’s much left for us to talk about.