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Oops! We Automated Bullshit. | Department of Computer Science and Technology
(www.cst.cam.ac.uk)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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It's a computer that understands my words and can reply, even complete tasks upon request, nevermind the result. To me that's pretty groundbreaking.
It's a probabilistic network that generates a response based on your input.
No understanding required.
Same
Ask it to write code that replaces every occurrence of "me" in every file name in a folder with "us", but excluding occurrences that are part of a word (like medium should not be usdium) and it will give you code that does exactly that.
You can ask it to write code that does a heat simulation in a plate of aluminum given one side of heated and the other cooled. It will get there with some help. It works. That's absolutely fucking crazy.
Maybe, that really depends on if that task or a very similar task exists in sufficient amounts in its training set. Basically, you could get essentially the same result by searching online for code examples, the LLM might just make it a little faster (and probably introduce some errors as well).
An LLM can only generate text that exists in its training data. That's a pretty important limitation, which has all kinds of copyright-related issues associated with it (e.g. I can't just copy a code example from GitHub in most cases).
No, it does not depend on preexisting tasks, which is why I told you those 2 random examples. You can come up with new, never before seen questions if you want to. How to stack a cable, car battery, beer bottle, welding machine, tea pot to get the highest tower. Whatever. It is not always right, but also much more capable than you think.
It is dependent on preexisting tasks, you're just describing encoded latent space.
It's not explicit but it's implicitly encoded.
And you still can't trust it because the encoding is intrinsically lossy.
It can come up with new solutions.
Ask it to finish writing the code to fetch a permission and it will make a request with a non-existent code. Ask it to implement an SNS API invocation and it'll make up calls that don't exist.
Regurgitating code that someone else wrote for an aluminum simulation isn't the flex you think it is: that's just an untrustworthy search engine, not a thinking machine
Yet it can outperform humans on some tests involving logic. It will never be perfect, but that implies you can test its IQ
IQ correlates with a good number of things though. It'a not perfect but it's not meaningless either.
And global warming correlates with the decline in piracy rates. IQ is a garbage statistic invented by early 20th century eugenicists to prove that white people were the best.
You can't boil down the nuance of the most complex object in the known universe to a single number.
Not perfectly you can't. But similarly to how people's SAT scores predict their future success, IQ tests in aggregate do have predictive power.
IQ is objectively a good measure of human intelligence. High IQ people have higher educational achievement, income, etc.
Don't take the effect and make it the cause my guy
I never said it's the cause. We're trying to find a measure that correlates well with actual intelligence g
IQ correlates with g, but also income/education correlates with g because smarter people do better in these metrics.
IQ doesn't make you smarter, but smarter people can do better on IQ tests
Smarter by what measure? IQ?
You're using circular reasoning here.
Income and education levels are not the same thing as intelligence, nor are smarter people higher earners or more well educated.
IQ correlates best with educational achievement. Educational achievement is best predicted by your zip code. Poverty creates sharp educational disadvantages.
Intelligence, as measured by your maximally attainable levels of obtaining knowledge and skills, is something that the majority of people will never test their limits of.
IQ tests do not measure that maximum, only how far along that trajectory you might have come compared to your "peers".
Therefore: IQ tests are 1 step removed from just asking someone where they grew up, how much college they attended and how much money their parents made.
It has nothing to do with measuring that underlying factor and everything to do with measuring socioeconomic status.
It was a crude tool invented by eugenicists to promote genocide and you should stop using or respecting it at all.
You have the cause and effect switched. More intelligent parents have higher incomes, their kids also are more likely to have higher intelligence because it's heritable. So if a bunch of rich Jews live in a Manhattan, does it mean that IQ is predicting their zip code? Or is it predicting they are Jewish? That's just a weird way of thinking about it.
Your definition of intelligence is not that is commonly thought of intelligence. It's like saying "intelligence is your maximum chess skill measured by elo and you will never achieve it"
But learning to play chess quickly would also fall under intelligence. Given not being a high level at a similar game, there will be people who learn quicker than others. Learning languages, learning from your experience, all fall under intelligence.
If you take all of these measures, average them, you will get a true intelligence measurement. IQ is a sample of true intelligence by using only some measurements, since intelligence can have an infinite amount of tasks that it can be used to perform
"Test it's IQ". The fact that you think IQ is a useful test for intelligence tells me everything I need to know
The fact you went out of your way to write it's when I wrote the correct "its" tells me everything I need to know about your educational achievement
That is exactly what it doesn't. There is no "understanding" and that is exactly the problem. It generates some output that is similar to what it has already seen from the dataset it's been fed with that might correlate to your input.