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Comment by ffsm8 | Hacker News Reader

What's mind-blowing to me is that people see the "you're right to push back" as anything besides hallucination / self affirmation

Dude, the fucking model is great for sure, but there is nothing behind the illusion. It doesn't know if something is right or wrong - simpler or harder to reason about etc

It's just generating text, in a coherent manner while following rhetoric processes as a solid attempt at logical thinking

Why is that so hard for people to grok?

Our industry (and society after) is beyond doomed with people seeing these self affirmations as anything like "insightful" validation.

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Looking on the bright side, where there's AI-generated muck, there will be brass for humans willing to clean it up.

How does it correct itself then? I often will push back without giving it the way out and it often does find it

If you're fantasy was real, then how can you also have it correct itself from a passable solution to a dumbsterfire?

That fundamentally wouldn't happen if it wasn't just an illusion.

There is value in it for sure and I can use it to write a lot of simple code, which is 99.99% of enterprise software - but that's another topic.

The coding aspect is a great example of why I am skeptical of the claim they cant reason (in its own way).

Something that can write a correct code snippet or even larger program that accepts the correct input and provides the correct output and otherwise is consistent with the given spec is doing something substantially more than just autocomplete.

I did say

> It's just generating text, in a coherent manner while following rhetoric processes as a solid attempt at logical thinking

So yeah, I do agree that they can make a very reasonable amount of reasoning. As a matter of fact, they reason about things better then an average Joe off the street ime.

That's entirely unrelated to what I said though, I think you misinterpreted/misunderstood what I wrote earlier.

They can make solid attempts at reasoning, its just not grounded in reality. It just applies these rhetoric processes to the current text - but it doesn't understand wherever it's actually correctly reasoned. Hence the answer "you're right to push back on this" is just the model being a sycophant. The sentence does not mean that anything of value has been communicated in either direction, and thinking that it has means the person in question is suffering from ai psychosis

Are you questioning how LLMs work? It's not a mystery up for debate, it's an open, well known system, you can go learn it for yourself and see.

By generating plausible-sounding corrections.

We'll see.

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