Why I am not impressed by A.I.

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What situations are you thinking of that requires reasoning?

I've used LLMs to create software i needed but couldn't find online.

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"My hammer is not well suited to cut vegetables"

There is so much to say about AI, can we move on from "it can't count letters and do math" ?

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Sure, maybe it’s not capable of producing the correct answer, which is fine. But it should say “As an LLM, I cannot answer questions like this” instead of just making up an answer.

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Sure, but I definitely wouldn’t confidently answer “two”.

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I have thought a lot on it. The LLM per se would not know if the question is answerable or not, as it doesn't know if their output is good of bad.

So there's various approach to this issue:

The classic approach, and the one used for censoring: keywords. When the llm gets a certain key word or it can get certain keyword by digesting a text input then give back a hard coded answer. Problem is that while censoring issues are limited. Hard to answer questions are unlimited, hard to hard code all.
Self check answers. For everything question the llm could process it 10 times with different seeds. Then analyze the results and see if they are equivalent. If they are not then just answer that it's unsure about the answer. Problem: multiplication of resource usage. For some questions like the one in the post, it's possible than the multiple randomized answers give equivalent results, so it would still have a decent failure rate.

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Why would it not know? It certainly “knows” that it’s an LLM and it presumably “knows” how LLMs work, so it could piece this together if it was capable of self-reflection.

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I’ve been avoiding this question up until now, but here goes:

Hey Siri …

how many r’s in strawberry? 0
how many letter r’s in the word strawberry? 10
count the letters in strawberry. How many are r’s? ChatGPT …..2

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It doesn't know shit. It's not a thinking entity.

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I get that it's usually just a dunk on AI, but it is also still a valid demonstration that AI has pretty severe and unpredictable gaps in functionality, in addition to failing to properly indicate confidence (or lack thereof).

People who understand that it's a glorified autocomplete will know how to disregard or prompt around some of these gaps, but this remains a litmus test because it succinctly shows you cannot trust an LLM response even in many "easy" cases.

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Precisely, it's not capable of self-reflection, thinking, or anything of the sort. It doesn't even understand the meaning of words

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But the problem is more "my do it all tool randomly fails at arbitrary tasks in an unpredictable fashion" making it hard to trust as a tool in any circumstances.

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But everyone selling llms sells them as being able to solve any problem, making it hard to know when it's going to fail and give you junk.

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Doc: That’s an interesting name, Mr…

Fletch: Babar.

Doc: Is that with one B or two?

Fletch: One. B-A-B-A-R.

Doc: That’s two.

Fletch: Yeah, but not right next to each other, that’s what I thought you meant.

Doc: Isn’t there a children’s book about an elephant named Babar.

Fletch: Ha, ha, ha. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any.

Doc: No children?

Fletch: No elephant books.

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I have it write for me emails in German. I moved there not too long ago, works wonders to get doctors appointment, car service, etc. I also have it explain the text, so I’m learning the language.

I also use it as an alternative to internet search, which is now terrible. It’s not going to help you to find smg super location specific, but I can ask it to tell me without spoilers smg about a game/movie or list metacritic scores in a table, etc.

It also works great in summarizing long texts.

LLM is a tool, what matters is how you use it. It is stupid, it doesn’t think, it’s mostly hype to call it AI. But it definitely has it’s benefits.

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And redbull give you wings.

Marketing within a capitalist market be like that for every product.

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it would be like complaining that a water balloon isn't useful because it isn't accurate. LLMs are good at approximating language, numbers are too specific and have more objective answers.

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Is anyone really pitching AI as being able to solve every problem though?

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it can, in the same way a loom did, just for more language-y tasks, a multimodal system might be better at answering that type of question by first detecting that this is a question of fact and that using a bucket sort algorithm on the word "strawberry" will answer the question better than it's questionably obtained correlations.

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It doesn't even see the word 'strawberry', it's been tokenized in a way to no longer see the 'text' that was input.

It's more like it sees a question like:
How many 'r's in 草莓?

And it spits out an answer not based on analysis of the input, but a model of what people might have said.

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if you want to find a few articles out of a few hundred that are about the benefits of nuclear weapons or other controversial topics that have significant literature on them it can be helpful to eliminate 90% that probably aren't what I'm looking for.

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Why I am not impressed by A.I.