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Comment by sigseg1v | Hacker News Reader

How is the getting stranded example different than asking on a travel forum how to get somewhere, and an active and well intentioned user that isn't familiar with your area of travel answers, gives you wrong instructions, and you get lost?

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The key missing step is where the traveler exercises critical thinking and checks the advice they get. Some people seem to turn that off for LLMs.

It's because we spent that last 50 years training people that computers are algorithmic, cold, and don't make human mistakes. Your calculator can't tell you the meaning of life, but it will never get 2 + 2 wrong.

Well, now the calculator can tell you a meaning of life, but it'll get 2 + 2 wrong 10% of the time.

Because they aren't probabilistic parrots? If they get it wrong, there's usually an understandable reason behind it.

cunningham's law [0] [1] increases the likelihood that at least one other person will point out the error and correct it. chances are you'll probably get more than one person posting.

LLMs don't do this. they give confident language output, not correct answers.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

[1]: https://xkcd.com/386/

Because the vast and overwhelmingly majority of the time, if you ask a question into the ether that nobody has a good answer to, most people will gloss over it and not bother answering, as attested by decades of relatable memes ( https://xkcd.com/979/ ). In contrast, the chatbot is trained to always attempt to give an answer, and is seemingly disincentivized via its training set to just shrug and say "I don't know, good luck fam".

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