Screenshot of this question was making the rounds last week. But this article covers testing against all the well-known models out there.
Also includes outtakes on the ‘reasoning’ models.
Screenshot of this question was making the rounds last week. But this article covers testing against all the well-known models out there.
Also includes outtakes on the ‘reasoning’ models.
Is cruise control useless because it doesn’t drive you to the grocery store? No. It’s not supposed to. It’s designed to maintain a steady speed - not to steer.
Large Language Models, as the name suggests, are designed to generate natural-sounding language - not to reason. They’re not useless - we’re just using them off-label and then complaining when they fail at something they were never built to do.
Language without meaning is garbage. Like, literal garbage, useful for nothing. Language is a tool used to express ideas, if there are no ideas being expressed then it’s just a combination of letters.
Which is exactly why LLMs are useless.
800 million weekly ChatGPT users disagree with that.
And there are 1.3 billion smokers in the world according to the WHO.
Does that make cigarettes useful?
Something being useful doesn’t imply it’s good or beneficial. Those terms are not synonymous. Usefulness describes whether a thing achieves a particular goal or serves a specific purpose effectively.
A torture device is useful for extracting information. A landmine is useful for denying an area to enemy troops.
No it fucking isn’t! This is a great analogy, actually, thank you for bringing it up. A person being tortured will tell you literally anything that they believe will stop you from torturing them. They will confess to crimes that never happened, tell you about all their accomplices who don’t exist, and all their daily schedules that were made up on the spot. Torture is useless but morons think it is useful. Just like AI.
Torture can be a useful way of extracting information if you have a way to instantly verify it, which actually makes it a good analogy to LLMs. If I want to know the password to your laptop and torture you until you give me the correct password and I log in then that works.
In fact it cannot ever be a useful way of extracting information. Even just randomly guessing is a better way to get the information you want than torture.
I’m not saying its anything other than morally repugnant, obviously, but in the example of a password with billions or trillions of combinations and where you can check the answers given torture pretty obviously is better than guessing.
That’s not a scenario that is ever likely to come up, and wouldn’t be justifiable even if it did, but pretending it wouldnt be effective is ridiculous.
If you can instantly verify it then you don’t need the torture.
Getting the person to volunteer the information is proven to be far, far more successful and being able to instantly verofy means you know when you have the answers.