If I was in the market for a new TV I'd probably go for an OLED assuming image burn-in is no longer an issue with them, but I'll happily use my 15 year old LED TV for as long as it lasts. I can tell the difference in contrast when side by side with LED/LCD but in normal daily use I don't pay any attention to it.
I have gerbils. Some of them love it and some couldn't care less. For one it took over 6 months of watching her sister and just sitting in it to figure out how it works. Once she did, there was no end to it.
Assuming the rest of your diet isn't stuffed with red meat I wouldn't worry too much about eating bacon. Replacing meat with vegan meat-substitutes doesn't automatically make the meal healthier - just free of meat.
I think comparing an LLM to a brain is a category mistake. LLMs aren’t designed to simulate how the brain works - they’re just statistical engines trained on language. Trying to mimic the human brain is a whole different tradition of AI research.
An LLM gives the kind of answers you’d expect from something that understands - but that doesn’t mean it actually does. The danger is sliding from “it acts like” to “it is.” I’m sure it has some kind of world model and is intelligent to an extent, but I think “understands” is too charitable when we’re talking about an LLM.
And about the idea that “if it’s just statistics, we should be able to see how it works” - I think that’s backwards. The reason it’s so hard to follow is because it’s nothing but raw statistics spread across billions of connections. If it were built on clean, human-readable rules, you could trace them step by step. But with this kind of system, it’s more like staring into noise that just happens to produce meaning when you ask the right question.
I also can’t help laughing a bit at myself for once being the “anti-AI” guy here. Usually I’m the one sticking up for it.
You’re right - in the NLP field, LLMs are described as doing “language understanding,” and that’s fine as long as we’re clear what that means. They process natural language input and can generate coherent output, which in a technical sense is a kind of understanding.
But that shouldn’t be confused with human-like understanding. LLMs simulate it statistically, without any grounding in meaning, concepts or reference to the world. That’s why earlier GPT models could produce paragraphs of flawless grammar that, once you read closely, were complete nonsense. They looked like understanding, but nothing underneath was actually tied to reality.
So I’d say both are true: LLMs “understand” in the NLP sense, but it’s not the same thing as human understanding. Mixing those two senses of the word is where people start talking past each other.
But it doesn’t understand - at least not in the sense humans do. When you give it a prompt, it breaks it into tokens, matches those against its training data, and generates the most statistically likely continuation. It doesn’t “know” what it’s saying, it’s just producing the next most probable output. That’s why it often fails at simple tasks like counting letters in a word - it isn’t actually reading and analyzing the word, just predicting text. In that sense it’s simulating understanding, not possessing it.
Well there I don't see any other options. No matter how much people tell them not to give an inch, that's just not realistic. The options are pretty much to cut your losses or take back the occupied territories by force. That's just not going to happen. If it was possible it would've already happened. The defensive positions preventing Ukraine to take back the lost ground are significantly more substantial than the ones holding Russia back. If they had equal numbers of men, then maybe but Russia has near infinite source of soldiers to toss into the meat grinder.
It's not about "AI stonks" really. If one genuinely believes that AGI will be the end of us then any form of retirement savings are just waste of time.
I really think that most investors aren't as hyped about AI stocks as the anti-AI crowd online wants us to believe. They may have increased the weight of their investments on the tech sector but the vast majority of investors are aware of the risk of not diversifying your portfolio and if you're someone with actual wealth you can invest then they're probably not putting it all on Open AI.
The recent drop in AI stocks that was in the news a week or two back doesn't even register on the value of my portfolio even though nearly all of the top companies on it are tech companies.
LLMs, as the name suggests, are language models - not knowledge machines. Answering questions correctly isn’t what they’re designed to do. The fact that they get anything right isn’t because they “know” things, but because they’ve been trained on a lot of correct information. That’s why they come off as more intelligent than they really are. At the end of the day, they were built to generate natural-sounding language - and that’s all. Just because something can speak doesn’t mean it knows what it’s talking about.
But what's the good thing? Yeah Lemmy might not be doing it but I can do it, and Elon can, and Zuck, and Putin and your grandmom. Whatever you post on Lemmy is as public as it can get.
That's just false. The chess opponent on Atari qualifies as AI.