Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
From Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance (linked in the article):
First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population.
Ohhh, that is sneaky!
What I find delightful about this is that I already wasn't impressed! Because, as the paper goes on to say
Moreover, although the UBE is a closed-book exam for humans, GPT-4’s huge training corpus largely distilled in its parameters means that it can effectively take the UBE “open-book”
And here I was thinking it not getting a perfect score on multiple-choice questions was already damning. But apparently it doesn't even get a particularly good score!
[...W]hen examining only those who passed the exam (i.e. licensed or license-pending attorneys), GPT-4’s performance is estimated to drop to 48th percentile overall, and 15th percentile on essays.
officially Not The Worst™, so clearly AI is going to take over law and governments any day now
also. what the hell is going on in that other reply thread. just a parade of people incorrecting each other going "LLM's don't work like [bad analogy], they work like [even worse analogy]". did we hit too many buzzwords?
Not the worst? 48th percentile is basically "average lawyer". I don't need a Supreme Court lawyer to argue my parking ticket. And if you train the LLM with specific case law and use RAG can get much better.
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn't hallucinate, they can process more clients, offer faster service and cheaper prices. Maybe not a revolution but still a win.
48th percentile is basically "average lawyer".
good thing all of law is just answering multiple-choice tests
I don't need a Supreme Court lawyer to argue my parking ticket.
because judges looooove reading AI garbage and will definitely be willing to work with someone who is just repeatedly stuffing legal-sounding keywords into google docs and mashing "generate"
And if you train the LLM with specific case law and use RAG can get much better.
"guys our keyword-stuffing techniques aren't working, we need a system to stuff EVEN MORE KEYWORDS into the keyword reassembler"
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter
oh i would love to read those court documents
and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn't hallucinate
wow, negative time saved! okay so your lawyer has to read and parse several paragraphs of statistical word salad, scrap 80+% of it because it's legalese-flavored gobbledygook, and then try to write around and reformat the remaining 20% into something that's syntactically and legally coherent -- you know, the thing their profession is literally on the line for. good idea
what promptfondlers continuously seem to fail to understand is that verification is the hard step. literally anyone on the planet can write a legal letter if they don't care about its quality or the ramifications of sending it to a judge in their criminal defense trial. part of being a lawyer is being able to tell actual legal arguments from bullshit, and when you hire an attorney, that is the skill you are paying for. not how many paragraphs of bullshit they can spit out per minute
they can process more clients, offer faster service and cheaper prices. Maybe not a revolution but still a win.
"but the line is going up!! see?! sure we're constantly losing cases and/or getting them thrown out because we're spamming documents full of nonsense at the court clerk, but we're doing it so quickly!!"
Spoken like someone who hasn't gotten beyond ChatGPT on default settings.
what the fuck kind of reply is this
That’s like saying a person reading a book before a quiz is doing it open book because they have the memory of reading that book.
It's more like taking a digital copy into the test room with you and Ctrl+F'ing every question/answer.
I'm not a big AI guy but it's really not quite like that, models do NOT contain all the data they were trained on.
Edit: I have no idea what's going on down below this comment
I’m not a big AI guy
we can tell
The guy above you is right though. So what are you on about?
Except it’s not, because they can’t perfectly recall everything.
It’s more like reading every book in the world, and someone asking you what comes next after “And I…”.
"will alwaaays love you...."
Easy. No other answer.
Why is that a criticism? This is how it works for humans too: we study, we learn the stuff, and then try to recall it during tests. We've been trained on the data too, for neither a human nor an ai would be able to do well on the test without learning it first.
This is part of what makes ai so "scary" that it can basically know so much.
LLMs know nothing. literally. they cannot.
I guess it comes down to a philosophical question as to what "know" actually means.
But from my perspective is that it certainly knows some things. It knows how to determine what I'm asking, and it clearly knows how to formulate a response by stitching together information. Is it perfect? No. But neither are humans, we mistakenly believe we know things all the time, and miscommunications are quite common.
But this is why I asked the follow up question...what's the effective difference? Don't get me wrong, they clearly have a lot of flaws right now. But my 8 year old had a lot of flaws too, and I assume both will get better with age.
i guess it comes down to a philosophical question
no, it doesn't, and it's not a philosophical question (and neither is this a question of philosophy).
the software simply has no cognitive capabilities.
don't compare your child to a chatbot wtf
The dehumanization that happens just because people think LLMs are impressive (they are, just not that impressive) is insane.
Yeah but neither did Socrates
but he at least was smug about it
Dont anthropomorphise. There is quite the difference between a human and an advanced lookuptable.
I absolutely agree. However, if you think the LLMs are just fancy LUTs, then I strongly disagree. Unless, of course, we are also just fancy LUTs.
You ever meet an ai researcher with a background in biology? I’ve discussed this stuff with one. She disagrees with Turing about machines thinking including when ai is in the picture. They process information very differently from how biology does
This is a vague non answer, although I agree it's done very differently because our process is biological and ai is not.
But as I asked elsewhere, what's the effective difference?
so to summarize, your only contributions to this thread are to go “well uh you just don’t know how LLMs work” while providing absolutely no detail of your own, and reporting our regulars for “Civility” when they rightly called you out for being a fucking idiot who’s way out of their depth
how fucking embarrassing for you
this thread enters the pantheon of things I'll occasionally return to when I need a laugh, joining the likes of bash.org (rip) and other qdbs
bash.org died!? damn...
It does every couple of years, remains to be seen if this one is permanent. Has been a while though…
the perils of hitting /all
416 updoots, what on earth
dj khaleb suffering from success dot jpeg
It's almost like we can't make a machine conscious until we know what makes a human conscious, and it's obvious Emergentism is bullshit because making machines smarter doesn't make them conscious
Time to start listening to Roger Penrose's Orch-OR theory as the evidence piles up - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
Orch-OR
Never heard of this thing but just reading through the wiki
An essential feature of Penrose's theory is that the choice of states when objective reduction occurs is selected neither randomly (as are choices following wave function collapse) nor algorithmically. Rather, states are selected by a "non-computable" influence embedded in the Planck scale of spacetime geometry.
Neither randomly nor alorithmically, rather magically. Like really, what the fuck else could you mean by "non-computable" in there that would be distinguishable from magic?
Penrose claimed that such information is Platonic, representing pure mathematical truths, which relates to Penrose's ideas concerning the three worlds: the physical, the mental, and the Platonic mathematical world. In Shadows of the Mind (1994), Penrose briefly indicates that this Platonic world could also include aesthetic and ethical values, but he does not commit to this further hypothesis.
And this is just crankery with absolutely no mathematical meaning. Also pure mathematical truths are not outside of the physical world, what the fuck would that even mean bro.
I thought Penrose was a smart physicist, the hell is he doing peddling this.
I thought Penrose was a smart physicist, the hell is he doing peddling this.
The given link contains exactly zero evidence in favor of Orchestrated Objective Reduction — "something interesting observed in vitro using UV spectroscopy" is a far cry from anything having biological relevance, let alone significance for understanding consciousness. And it's not like Orch-OR deserves the lofty label of theory, anyway; it's an ill-defined, under-specified, ad hoc proposal to throw out quantum mechanics and replace it with something else.
The fact that programs built to do spicy autocomplete turn out to do spicy autocomplete has, as far as I can tell, zero implications for any theory of consciousness one way or the other.
Bro the main objection to Orch-OR is that the brain is too warm for Quatnum stuff to happen there, and then they found Quantum stuff in the brain.... So... not sure how it's not suggestive of the reality of Orch-OR
Edit: Btw, I don't know where you're getting the idea that Orch-OR is "Trying to throw out Quantum Mechanics and replace it with something else", considering that it's dependent upon Quantum Mechanics, and we have demonstrated that "Quantum Biology" is a thing in plants - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-it-comes-to-photosynthesis-plants-perform-quantum-computation/ and in birds - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01725-1
So why not the brain?
Kludging an "objective reduction" process into the dynamics is throwing out quantum mechanics and replacing it with something else. And because Orch-OR is not quantum mechanics, every observation that a quantum effect might be biologically important somewhere is irrelevant. Orch-OR isn't "quantum biology", it's pixie-dust biology.
Though making an unreliable intern is amazing and was impossible 5 years ago...
thank fuck sama invented the concept of doing a shit job
I mean, it’s not shit at everything; it can be quite useful in the right context (GitHub Copilot is a prime example). Still, it doesn’t surprise me that these first-party LLM benchmarks are full of smoke and mirrors.
citation needed
That GitHub Copilot and friends are useful? I would argue that their utility is rather subjective, but there are indications that it improves developer productivity.
I’m unsure if you’ve used tools like GH Copilot before, but it primarily operates through “completions” (“spicy autocorrect” in its truest form) rather than a chatbot-like interface. It’s mostly good for filling out boilerplate and code that has a single obvious solution; not game-changing intelligence by any means, but useful in relieving the programmer of various menial tasks.
May I ask, what evidence are you hoping to see in particular?
https://awful.systems/comment/1286383
I look forward to the money that I'll make cleaning up the mess you provide people with
all in all: underwhelming. I remain promptdubious.
I know I'm six months late to the party but how do you like "promptcritical"?