artificial "intelligence"

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. We have been doing this for as long a... See more

Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul. Magic.

Aside: calling LLMs for translation “Babel Fish” is glossing over some of the major flaws in these tools work for translation, which is that they only sorta kinda work for languages with a large body of text in the training data set. For most languages in the world that don’t have huge pools of textual sludge all over the web, like Icelandic or Dan... See more

The web, taken in it’s near entirety as LLM vendors seem to have done, isn’t the wellspring of all written knowledge, but is instead a poisoned well. It may be only a “little bit” poisoned, from the perspective of those of us swimming in a sea of aggro and trolling, but that toxicity gets magnified when the ocean is condensed into a model. It resul... See more

the statistical modelling used in biological, medical, or “hard science” research is not of the scientific texts themselves . It’s of data and statistical observations. That statistical modelling might be of help with statistics is an obvious conclusion. That statistical modelling of text might help with statistics is not .