From a linguistic perspective, this is why I am impressed by (or at least, astonished by) LLMs!
There is an alternative reality out there where LLMs were never marketed as AI and were marketed as random generator.
In that world, tech savvy people would embrace this tech instead of having to constantly educate people that it is in fact not intelligence.
That was this reality. Very briefly. Remember AI Dungeon and the other clones that were popular prior to the mass ml marketing campaigns of the last 2 years?
They are not random per se. They are just statistical with just some degree of randomization.
This is a bad example… If I ask a friend "is strawberry spelled with one or two r’s"they would think I’m asking about the last part of the word.
The question seems to be specifically made to trip up LLMs. I’ve never heard anyone ask how many of a certain letter is in a word. I’ve heard people ask how you spell a word and if it’s with one or two of a specific letter though.
If you think of LLMs as something with actual intelligence you’re going to be very unimpressed… It’s just a model to predict the next word.
If you think of LLMs as something with actual intelligence you’re going to be very unimpressed… It’s just a model to predict the next word.
This is exactly the problem, though. They don’t have “intelligence” or any actual reasoning, yet they are constantly being used in situations that require reasoning.
Maybe if you focus on pro- or anti-AI sources, but if you talk to actual professionals or hobbyists solving actual problems, you’ll see very different applications. If you go into it looking for problems, you’ll find them, likewise if you go into it for use cases, you’ll find them.
Personally I have yet to find a use case. Every single time I try to use an LLM for a task (even ones they are supposedly good at), I find the results so lacking that I spend more time fixing its mistakes than I would have just doing it myself.
So youve never used it as a starting point to learn about a new topic? You’ve never used it to look up a song when you can only remember a small section of lyrics? What about when you want to code a block of code that is simple but monotonous to code yourself? Or to suggest plans for how to create simple sturctures/inventions?
Anything with a verifyable answer that youd ask on a forum can generally be answered by an llm, because theyre largely trained on forums and theres a decent section the training data included someone asking the question you are currently asking.
Hell, ask chatgpt what use cases it would recommend for itself, im sure itll have something interesting.
What situations are you thinking of that requires reasoning?
I’ve used LLMs to create software i needed but couldn’t find online.
Creating software is a great example, actually. Coding absolutely requires reasoning. I’ve tried using code-focused LLMs to write blocks of code, or even some basic YAML files, but the output is often unusable.
It rarely makes syntax errors, but it will do things like reference libraries that haven’t been imported or hallucinate functions that don’t exist. It also constantly misunderstands the assignment and creates something that technically works but doesn’t accomplish the intended task.
If you think of LLMs as something with actual intelligence you’re going to be very unimpressed
Artificial sugar is still sugar.
Artificial intelligence implies there is intelligence in some shape or form.
Thats because it wasnt originally called AI. It was called an LLM. Techbros trying to sell it and articles wanting to fan the flames started called it AI and eventually it became common dialect. No one in the field seriously calls it AI, they generally save that terms to refer to general AI or at least narrow ai. Of which an llm is neither.
Something that pretends or looks like intelligence, but actually isn’t at all is a perfectly valid interpretation of the word artificial - fake intelligence.
Artificial sugar is still sugar.
Because it contains sucrose, fructose or glucose? Because it metabolises the same and matches the glycemic index of sugar?
Because those are all wrong. What’s your criteria?
In this example a sugar is something that is sweet.
Another example is artificial flavours still being a flavour.
Or like artificial light being in fact light.
This is literally just a tokenization artifact. If I asked you how many r’s are in /0x5273/0x7183 you’d be confused too.
Sure, but I definitely wouldn’t confidently answer “two”.
Fair enough - sounds like they might not be ready for prime time though.
Oh well, at least while the bugs get ironed-out we’re not using them for anything important
It’s predictive text on speed. The LLMs currently in vogue hardly qualify as A.I. tbh…
Still, it’s kinda insane how two years ago we didn’t imagine we would be instructing programs like “be helpful but avoid sensitive topics”.
That was definitely a big step in AI.
A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale.’
He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador Retriever sitting there.
“You talk?” he asks.
“Yep” the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, “So, what’s your story?”
The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping, I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running… but the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
“Ten dollars” the guy says.
“Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on Earth are you selling him so cheap?”
“Because he’s a liar. He’s never been out of the yard.”
I mean, that’s how I would think about it…
Why?
The typo in “strawbery” leads to a conversation like “hey you spelt this wrong there’s two r’s (after the e) not one”
Huh. It’s just simply a wrong answer though.
I’ve already had more than one conversation where people quote AI as if it were a source, like quoting google as a source. When I showed them how it can sometimes lie and explain it’s not a primary source for anything I just get that blank stare like I have two heads.
Me too. More than once on a language learning subreddit for my first language: “I asked ChatGPT whether this was correct grammar in German, it said no, but I read this counterexample”, then everyone correctly responded “why the fuck are you asking ChatGPT about this”.
I use ai like that except im not using the same shit everyone else is on. I use a dolphin fine tuned model with tool use hooked up to an embedder and searxng. Every claim it makes is sourced.
Sure buddy
I can already see it…
Ad: CAN YOU SOLVE THIS IMPOSSIBLE RIDDLE THAT AI CAN’T SOLVE?!
With OP’s image. And then it will have the following once you solve it: “congratz, send us your personal details and you’ll be added to the hall of fame at CERN Headquarters”
You asked a stupid question and got a stupid response, seems fine to me.
Yes, nobody asking that question is wonderring about the “straw” part of the word. They’re asking, is the “berry” part one, or two "r"s
“strawbery” has 2 R’s in it while “strawberry” has 3.
Fucking AI can’t even count.
It’s like someone who has no formal education but has a high level of confidence and eavesdrops on a lot of random conversations.
You rang?
Works fine for me in o3-mini-high:
Counting letters in “strawberry”
Alright, I’m checking: the word “strawberry” is spelled S T R A W B E R R Y. Let me count the letters: S (1), T (2), R (3), A (4), W (5), B (6), E (7), R (8), R (9), Y (10). There are three R’s: in positions 3, 8, and 9. So, the answer is 3. Even if we ignore case, the count still holds. Therefore, there are 3 r’s in “strawberry.”
Finally! With a household energy consumption for one day we can count how many Rs are in strawberry.
A normal person would say ‘strawberry with two "r"s’
What would have been different about this if it had impressed you? It answered the literal question and also the question the user was actually trying to ask.
It didn’t? StRawbeRy has 2 rs. StRawbeRRy has 3.
OHHHHHHH… my bad. I’m an idiot. Being an LLM it’s giving the answer it thinks a human such as myself would come up with.
Maybe you’re a bot too…
Not last time I checked, but we all could be as far as you know.
How many strawberries could a strawberry bury if a strawberry could bury strawberries 🍓
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