Also: would you expect random people to fare any better?
It has done more complex things for me than this and, sometimes, gotten it right.
Yes, it’s supposed to be able to do this.
It's purported to be a major use case.
The general public does not know nor understand this limitation. At the same time OpenAI is selling this a a tutor for your kids. Next it will be used to test those same kids.
Who is going to prevent this from being used to pick military targets (EU law has an exemption for military of course) or make surgery decisions?
Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future, someone might use some other variation of AI for this but LLMs are not very effective on this.
I guess the future is now then: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how...
Excerpt:
>Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers.
>In an interview published before the war, he said it was “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”.
>According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
It is rather implausible to say that an LLM will never be used for this application, because in the current hype environment the only reason the LLM is not deployed to production is that someone actually tried to use it first.
LLM's will of course also be used, due to their convenience and superficial 'intelligence', and because of the layer of deniability creating a technical substrate between soldier and civilian victim provides - as has happened for two decades with drones.
https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-art...
Probably this is due to confusion over what the term "AI" means. If you do some queries on a database, and call yourself a "data scientist", and other people who call themselves data scientists do some AI, does that mean you're doing AI? For left wing journalists who want to undermine the Israelis (the story originally appeared in the Guardian) it'd be easy to hear what you want to hear from your sources and conflate using data with using AI. This is the kind of blurring that happens all the time with apparently technical terms once they leave the tech world and especially once they enter journalism.
At most charitable, that means a person is reviewing all data points before approval.
At least charitable, that means a person is clicking approved after glancing at the values generated by the system.
The press release doesn't help clarify that one way or the other.
If you want to read thoughts by the guy who was in charge of building and operating the automated intelligence system, he wrote a book: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Machine-Team-Artificial-Intelli...
Given that the underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't select their own targets), and given that the sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel, it makes more sense that the story is being misreported.
The premise that the IDF would use some form of automated information processing to help select potential targets, in the year 2023?
There's nothing at all unrealistic about this premise, of course. If anything it's rather bizarre to suggest that it might be.
The sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel
This sounds you just don't have much to say about the substantive claims of these reports (which began with research by two Israeli publications, +972 and the Local Call -- and then taken further by The Guardian). Or would you say that former two "openly loathe Israel" also? Along with the Israeli sources that they're quoting?
AI is how it is marketed to the buyers. Either way, the system isn't a database or simple statistics. https://www.accessnow.org/publication/artificial-genocidal-i...
Ex, autonomous weapons like "smart shooter" employed in Hebron and Bethlehem: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/06/palestinian-forum-highli...
These sources are rife with bias. The first article literally says 'artificial genocidal intelligence'. The second emmediatly references the international crime of apartheid.
Genocide was the Arab world's openly stated objective for the Jews in 1948.
The international crime of apartheid was created by the United Nations. To those who understand the middle east, this statement is as equal an endictment of credibility as the former regarding genocide.
The nuance matters. The history matters. I'd recommend watching PBS's lengthy series 'Israel and the Arabs.' it's entertaining and enlightening. Then spend another few hours on the topic and travel to the middle east to see it yourself. After that, articles such as the ones you posted really read quite differently than most might expect.
A euphemism for apartheid and oppression?
> sources are rife with bias
What's biased about terming autonomous weapons as "AI"? Or, sounding alarm over dystopian surveillance enabled by AI?
> The nuance matters.
Like Ben Gurion terming Lehi "freedom fighters" as terrorists? And American Jewish intellectuals back then calling them fascists?
> The history matters... After that, articles such as the ones you posted really read quite differently than most might expect.
https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/i-changed-my-mind-on-zioni...
Most people have already made up their minds. There is little I can do about that, but perhaps someone else might see this and think twice.
Personally, I have spent many thousands of hours on this topic. I have Palestinian relatives and have visited the Middle East. I have Arab friends there, both Christian and Muslim, whom I would gladly protect with my life. I am neither Jewish nor Israeli.
There are countless reasons for me to support your side of this issue. However, I have not done so for a simple reason: I strive to remain fiercely objective.
As a final note, in my youth, I held views similar to the ones you propagate. This was for a simple reason—I had not taken the time to understand the complexities of the Middle East. Even now, I cannot claim to fully comprehend them. However, over time, one realizes that while every story has two sides, the context is crucial. The contextual depth required to grasp the regrettable necessity of Israeli actions in their neighborhood can take years or even decades of study to reconcile. I expect to change few minds on this topic. Ultimately, it is up to the voters to decide. There is overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel in one of the world's most divided congresses, and this support stems more from shared values than from arms sales.
I stand by my original comment. As I said, this will be my last on this topic. I hope this exchange proves useful to some.
Commendable. You'll appreciate this Israeli historian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj_HKw-UlUk (summary: https://archive.is/dOP7g). And this Israeli Prof, also an expert on Holocaust studies, being fiercely objective: https://www.mekomit.co.il/ps/134005/ (en: https://archive.is/Fjj6f)
> I had not taken the time to understand the complexities of the Middle East. Even now, I cannot claim to fully comprehend them.
Why even spend 2 comments?
> The contextual depth required to grasp the regrettable necessity of Israeli actions...
The same level of depth as Supremacists who regrettably exterminated non-Aryans?
> There is overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel in one of the world's most divided congresses, and this support stems more from shared values.
This is undeniable, but the underlying "shared values" here are not the ones you'd like us to think: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/instruments-of-dehuman...
> I stand by my original comment.
Like you say, there's the entire might of the US political and elite class behind you; it isn't some act of courage or rebellion, fwiw.
> As a final note, in my youth, I held views similar to the ones you propagate.
Propagate? Your final note sounds like a threat.
I got to say this is a pretty masterful deceit.
How would you substantiate this claim?
Call these LLMs stupid all you want but on focused tasks they can reason decently enough. And better than any past tech.
Make defensive comments in response to LLM skepticism all you want— there are still precisely zero (0) reasons to believe they’ll make a quantum leap towards human-level reasoning any time soon.
The fact that they’re much better than any previous tech is irrelevant when they’re still so obviously far from competent in so many important ways.
To allow your technological optimism to convince you to that this very simple and very big challenge is somehow trivial and that progress will inevitably continue apace is to engage in the very drollest form of kidding yoursef.
Pre-space travel, you could’ve climbed the tallest mountain on earth and have truthfully claimed that you were closer to the moon than any previous human, but that doesn’t change the fact that the best way to actually get to the moon is to climb down from the mountain and start building a rocket.
why are you... kinda going off like this?
On top of that, why do you follow me around over the course of ... months making these comments. Its really extreme.
You'd be surprised.
Not to mention it's also used for military and intelligence "analysis".
>using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away
When immaturity and unfitness for purpose has ever stopped companies selling crap?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us...
I'm 100% on the side of Israel having the right to defend itself, but as I understand it, they are already using "AI" to pick targets, and they adjust the threshold each day to meet quotas. I have no doubt that some day they'll run somebody's messages through chat gpt or similar and get the order: kill/do not kill.
That's a brilliant and sustainable strategy. /s
people are trying to sell this right now. maybe it won't work and will just create more problems, errors, and work for medical professionals, but when did that ever stop hospital administrators from buying some shiny new technology without asking anyone.
So the military already was using math to pick targets, this is just the next logical step, albeit, scary as hell step.
How are you supposed to say why a machine learning model produces different outputs from the same input? It's just a black box.
Analyzing surgical field...
Identified: open chest cavity, exposed internal organs
Organs appear gooey, gelatinous, translucent pink
Comparing to database of aquatic lifeforms...
93% visual match found:
Psychrolutes marcidus, common name "blobfish"
Conclusion: Blobfish discovered inhabiting patient's thoracic cavity
Recommended action: Attempt to safely extract blobfish without damaging organsThe Diamond Age.
I'm worried that a generation might learn that that's good enough.
So it can’t really be worse if there’s just a RNG in a box. It may be better.
I really hope that these type of situations won't increase because the mental strain that put on some people in the org is not sustainable in the long run.
"Hallucination-free," indeed.
Would love to know what actual, contractual guarantees they place around that.
Humans make mistakes all the time. Teachers certainly did back when I was in school. There's no fundamental qualitative difference here. And I don't even see any evidence that there's any difference in degree, either.
Humans can be wrong, but they aren't able to be wrong at as massive of a scale and they often have an override button where you can get them to look at something again.
When you have an AI deployed system and full automation you've got more opportunities for "I dunno, the AI says that you are unqualified for this job and there is no way around that."
We already see this with less novel forms of automation. There are great benefits here, but also the number of times people are just stymied completely by "computer says no" has exploded. Expect that to increase further.
However, now that computers can plausibly do certain tasks that they couldn't before via LLMs, society has to learn that this is an area of computing that can't be trusted. That might be easy for more advanced users who already don't trust what corporations are doing with technology[0], but for most people this is going to be a tall order.
With humans there is a chance you get things right.
But most people do expect computers to be infallible, and the marketing hype for LLMs is that they are going to replace all human intellectual labor. Huge numbers of people actually believe that. And if you could convince an LLM it was wrong (you can’t, not reliably), it has no way around the system it’s baked into.
All of these things are really really dangerous, and just blithely dismissing it as “humans make mistakes, too, lol” is really naive. Humans can decide not to drop a bomb or shoot a gun if they see that their target isn’t what they expect. AIs never will.
Pretty much every element of the above statements is false. Heck, either your response to me, or this reply, seem to be examples showing that the first one is wrong.
Computers are final. You don't want things to be final when your life's on the line.
You'll never make senior management with that attitude. At worst, "mistakes were made" and look a bit sad.
I've heard the same comparisons made with self-driving cars (i.e. that humans are fallible, and maybe even more error-prone).
But this misses the point. People trust the fallibility they know. That is, we largely understand human failure modes (errors in judgement, lapses in attention, etc) and feel like we are in control of them (and we are).
OTOH, when machines make mistakes, they are experienced as unpredictable and outside of our control. Additionally, our expectation of machines is that they are deterministic and not subject to mistakes. While we know bugs can exist, it's not the expectation. And, with the current generation of AI in particular, we are dealing with models that are generally probabilistic, which means there's not even the expectation that they are errorless.
And, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect people to give up control to AI of this quality, particularly in matters of safety or life and death; really anything that matters.
TLDR; Most people don't want to gamble their lives on a statistic, when the alternative is maintaining control.
This is all to say that randomly distributed failures are more tolerable than a relatively smaller number of concentrated failures. Human errors are rather nice by comparison because they're inconsistent in locality while still being otherwise predictable in macroscopic terms (e.g.: on any given day, there will always be far more rear-endings than head-on collisions). When it comes to machine networks, all it takes is one firmware update for both the type & locality of their failure modes to go into a wildly different direction.
By definition, stats operate at the macro level. So, for instance, I may be a safer driver than the AI average. Should I give up control? I suppose it's also a matter of degree and there's the network effect to consider (i.e. even If I individually beat the average, I'm still on the road with others who don't).
So it gets a little more complicated and I'm also not sure the aversion to relinquishing control is strictly "emotional" (as in the irrational sense). There's something about the potential finality of a failure that goes along with autonomy and agency over one's own life. The idea that a machine could make a mistake that ends your life, and you never had a chance or say in that outcome is off-putting in ways that feel more rooted in rationality and survival than in emotion.
yikes, mate, you've really misunderstood what's happening.
when a human fucks up, a human has fucked up. you can appeal to them, or to their boss, or to their CEO.
the way these crappy "AI" systems are being deployed, there is no one to appeal to and no process for unfucking things.
yes, this is not exactly caused by AI, it's caused by sociopaths operating businesses and governments, but the extent to which this enabled them and their terrible disdain for the world is horrifying.
this is already happening, of course - Cathy O'Neil wrote "Weapons Of Math Destruction" in 2016, about how unreviewable software systems were screwing people, from denying poor people loans to harsher sentencing for minority groups, but Sam Altman and the new generation of AI grifters now want this to apply to everything.
When AI is in charge of controlling weapons, you get this: https://www.accessnow.org/publication/artificial-genocidal-i...
I wrote a working machine vision project in 2 days with these toys. Key word: working... Not hallucinated. Actually working. Very useful.
The trick though is learning how to prompt, and developing the sense that the LLM is stuck with the current prompt and needs another perspective. Funnily enough, the least amount of luck I've had is getting the LLM to write precisely enough for science (yay I still have a job), even without the confabulation, the nuance is lacking...that it's almost always faster for me to write it myself.
I can’t relate. Currently in university. Everyone is thankful to God ChatGPT exists. I’d think it must be a joke, or your daughter somehow managed to live in a social circle which doesn’t yet adopted chatbots for school purposes.
OpenAI have even added a feature to make the completions from GPT near-deterministic (by specifying a seed). It seems that no matter what AI companies do, there will be a vocal minority shouting that it's worthless.
The idea that we argue about safety... Seems reasonable to me.
The argument about its usefulness or capability at all? I dunno... That slider bar sure is in a wierd spot... I feel ya.
People are deliberately self selecting themselves out of the next industrial revolution. It's Darwin Awards for SWE careers. It's making me ranty.
Key word: working
The bubble is real on both sides. Models have limitations... However, they are not toys. They are powerful tools. I used 3 different SotA models for that project. The time saved is hard to even measure. It's big.
You are aware that this is an obvious contradiction, right? Big times savings are not hard to measure.
Furthermore... big mountains are easier to weigh v small individual atoms? I think it's a little more complicated than big is easy to measure...
I care little about the precision... I've got other priorities. It's the same as the time the internet saves me... Big. It's obvious.
I stand by my statement. It's hard to measure...
This is such an anti-intellectual comment to make, can't you see that?
You mention "sample" so you understand what statistics is, then in the same sentence claim 90% seems unlikely with a sample size of 1.
The article has done substantial research
He's a much simpler and correct description that almost everyone can understand: it fucks up constantly.
Getting something wrong even once can make it useless for most people. No amount of pedantry will change this reality.
This isn't pedantry, it's science.
Needle-in-a-needlestack contrasts with needle-in-a-haystack by being about finding a piece of data among similar ones (e.g. one specific limeric among thousands of others), rather than among disimilar ones.
I would note that LLMs handle this task better if you slice the two documents into smaller sections and iterate section by section. They aren’t able to reason and have no memory so can’t structurally analyze two blobs of text beyond relatively small pieces. But incrementally walking through in much smaller pieces that are themselves semantically contained and related works very well.
The assumption that they are magic machines is a flawed one. They have limits and capabilities and like any tool you need to understand what works and doesn’t work and it helps to understand why. I’m not sure why the bar for what is still a generally new advance for 99.9% of developers is effectively infinitely high while every other technology before LLMs seemed to have a pretty reasonable “ok let’s figure out how to use this properly.” Maybe because they talk to us in a way that appears like it could have capabilities it doesn’t? Maybe it’s close enough sounding to a human that we fault it for not being one? The hype is both overstated and understated simultaneously but there have been similar hype cycles in my life (even things like XML were going to end world hunger at one point).
Using ctrl-f I was able to see that they were identical in one another.
Obviously this is a single sample but saying 90% seems unlikely. They were around ~80k tokens total.