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Comment by eminent101 | Hacker News Reader

> trivial for a human expert is not barely understood by ChatGPT

I try to stay away from these arguments but it's a Saturday, so what the heck! I think this topic is becoming a tired topic now. One party would claim that ChatGPT doesn't "understand". Other party would claim that it's a large statistical model, of course it doesn't "understand". Do you expect your washing machine to "understand" that it's washing clothes? Then there is another party that would claim, rightfully, do we understand what "understanding" is? This has been rinsed and repeated over and over again ad nauseum. Is there anything more to learn in these arguments?

I mean, can we just give "ChatGPT got some things wrong, haha" some rest now?

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> I mean, can we just give "ChatGPT got some things wrong, haha" some rest now?

Sure, right after the “AI is more profound than fire and electricity”¹ arguments stop.

People keep making counter arguments because the argument keeps getting made. Stop inundating HN (and everywhere else) with praise for LLMs as if they were the second coming of Christ and the counter arguments will subside too.

¹ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-...

Article title: Google CEO: A.I. is more important than fire or electricity

Quote from article: AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire," says Pichai

——

That’s not the argument he made. I have said for a long time that you can find always someone saying anything you want on the Internet, with that you can paint your side/any-side all with the same brush even if it’s an opinion held by only 1 person.

There might some someone on Twitter who actually thinks AI is more _important_ than fire or electricity but that’s not a commonly held belief and it’s not even the case in the article you linked.

> I have said for a long time that you can find always someone saying anything you want on the Internet

Agreed. But who says it matters too. Some people scream into the void, others share opinions that sway elections and affect the lives of millions.

I’m not only considering Pichai, he was merely the first proxy I remembered. The point is that the importance and abilities of LLMs are regularly overstated.

>if it’s an opinion held by only 1 person.

an opinion held by Sundar Pichai about technically important issues is much more than an opinion held by 1 person

Except the originally stated option (in the comment and in the article title) is completely false. He didn’t say AI was more _important_ but that it was more _profound_. There is a difference and words have meaning.

That is not the point of the argument. But fine, I edited the original post to use “profound” so we can end this nitpick. Yes, words have meanings and we should absolutely consider those differences when they’re the central thesis. But this wasn’t it, it was merely the first buffoon with a similar argument I could think of. He served as an example of a trend, not as the entire point. It makes zero difference if he said “profound” or “important”, they are equally stupid in this context.

as a general rule when someone discusses profound technology they mean it is important, words may have meaning but they also have common usage and when he says AI is profound he certainly doesn't mean it is deep like the ocean.

Evidently you do not agree with this - so please tell me, what technology do you consider profound and yet, also, unimportant.

My friend and I have a game where we link each other a wildly successful submission title on reddit (usually political) and then screenshot the part of the article (usually not linked on reddit) that reveals the title as phony.

Thousands of comments reacting to a headline or screenshot of a tweet that purports to summarize a headline without actually reading TFA.

Yep, I used to get caught up in headlines and I’m sure I still read too much into them but if there is an outlandish comment/position/opinion in the title OR something that perfectly fits with my “world view” I make myself find the real quote/line which often just further erodes trust in reporting institutions.

You need to consider your source of course, but more often than not the more outlandish the claim the more likely it was misquoted or they had the wrong takeaway.

it can be more profund and still fuck up all the time!

And yes, the completely blind zealous worship by these parasite outlets is even worse than the absolutely uncritical copy-pasting of AI output that some people post on forums.

I had several moments in my life where i learned about a thing from its source of truth (documentation, source code, standards) and was infuriated that the common knowledge about it was just wrong. I can give a long list but that would derail the thread.

Fact is, common knowledge is extremely bad, for whatever reason. Stochastic language models are trained on common knowledge.

Ask ChatGPT what the "B" in the name for the DB-9 connector means. Or why the "/usr" directory is named that way. ChatGPT will reliably give the popular, but wrong answers.

You are starting to sound exactly what generated accounts by OpenAI would say in response to these kind of criticisms.

I'd strongly suggest addressing the points I've made rather than resorting to a lazy dismissal like I "sound like a generated account." It's a non-argument and contributes nothing.

For the record, I'm not affiliated with OpenAI. I use ChatGPT often. It solves my problem many times. Many times it fails miserably. I neither love it nor hate it. It is what it is.

My frustration stems from the sheer laziness of some posts and comments about LLMs here on HN. The ones that irritate me the most are those that expect LLMs to somehow possess magical abilities like being able to inherently distinguish between correct and incorrect outputs. Where does this expectation even come from? Have these people spent no time at all understanding how LLMs actually work? No? And yet they expect magic? It's baffling!

If you have a substantial critique of the points I raised, by all means, share it. If not, please spare me the hand-waving dismissals.

Your argument is upside down. If people are insisting LLMs aren’t magic, it’s only because too many people argue that they are. Just like you’re frustrated at the repeated con arguments, other people are frustrated at the repeated pro arguments.

Your "argument" is so poorly constructed that it could easily be considered trolling and therefore feels like it has no point to engage it, thats one of the main reasons it reads as generated by OpenAI bot accounts, like just today someone realized they could ask about the time Jimmy Carter kicked a klansmen in the nuts and GPT would explain with excruciating detail how and when it went down, except this never happened, but with your "argument" we should just assume that GPT making things way too frequently its just a part of life and that its still a pretty useful tool despite misleading thousands of people in a daily basis.

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