"A key challenge of (LLMs) is that they do not come with a manual! They come with a “Twitter influencer manual” instead, where lots of people online loudly boast about the things they can do with a very low accuracy rate, which is really frustrating..."
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
Johann Van Tonder added
"There’s really no replacement for spending time with these things, working towards a deeper mental model of the things they are good at and the things they are likely to mess up. Combining with domain knowledge of the thing you are working on is key too, especially as that can help protect you against them making things up!"
- Simon Willison, attem
Johann Van Tonder added
First of all, I'd say you have a bigger problem where your company is trying to find nails with a hammer. That is where your sentiment comes from, and could be an obstacle for both you and the company. It's the same deal when I see people keep on talking about RAG, and nowadays "modular RAG", when really, you could treat everything as a software co... See more
r/MachineLearning - Reddit
Nicolay Gerold added
In the work with LLMs lies a deeper question, that I have not been able to answer for myself properly so far. I can use an LLM to extract information, summarise, distill, but it feels like I am fooling myself. The work that I have done is not done by me. I am have not made any connections in my brain. It feels like we should not use them for intell
... See moreA very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more
Steven Johnson • Revenge of the Humanities
Brian Wiesner and added
A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions.
Steven Johnson • Revenge of the Humanities
- What a modern LLM does during training is, essentially, very very quickly skim the textbook, the words just flying by , not spending much brain power on it.
- Rather, when you or I read that math textbook, we read a couple pages slowly; then have an internal monologue about the material in our heads and talk about it with a few study-buddies; read an
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS - The Decade Ahead • I. From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs
Max Beauroyre added
The question of whether LLMs can reason is, in many ways, the wrong question. The more interesting question is whether they are limited to memorization / interpolative retrieval, or whether they can adapt to novelty beyond what they know. (They can't, at least until you start doing active inference, or using them in a search loop, etc.)
There are ... See more
Matt Mower added