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Re:Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in s... by lukev on Saturday May 25, 2024 @07:41PM (#40478679)
A relevant point to this is the notion of "System-1" vs "System-2" thinking. Somewhat dubious when applied to actual human psychology but I think a valid metaphor for how LLMs work: they are only capable of System-1 thinking; a single forward pass through the weights of intuition

In my actual life, I don't trust my own System-1 thoughts: for anything important, I'm always going to engage System-2. And LLMs don't have a System-2.

(I also agree that when dealing with LLMs the value of X is not a single value but a highly complex space depending on the nature of the question and the training data of the model. In my mind it does not change the epistemological equation, it just means that even the value of X itself is harder to "know", so this ambiguity can only ever make LLMs a less viable source of knowledge.)

Re:Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in s... by eynsham on Sunday May 26, 2024 @09:06AM (#40481862)
I am not sure that the ambiguity has to work that way. The suggestion I am making is that if we fix the distribution on questions and the training data, we might (a) know the value of X in this specific case, (b) be able to ensure that it is fairly high.

I’d say this is the murky case because on the fixed training data and query distribution X ≈ 1 and we know that even though we don’t know the value of X on other training data and other query distributions. I think that might be where the disagreement lies.