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Comment on AI hallucinations are impossible to eradicate — but a recent, embarrassing malfunction from one of China’s biggest tech firms shows how they can be much more damaging there than in other countries

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t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The purpose of an LLM, at a fundamental level, is to approximate text it was trained on. If it was trained on gibberish, outputting gibberish wouldn’t be a bug. If it wasn’t, outputting gibberish would be indicative of a bug.

I can still say the car is malfunctioning.

A better analogy would be selling someone a diesel car, when they wanted an electric vehicle, and them being upset when it requires refueling with gas. The car is t malfunctioning in that case, the salesman was.

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AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The purpose of an LLM, at a fundamental level, is to approximate text it was trained on.

I’d argue that’s what an LLM is, not its purpose. Continuing the car analogy, that’s like saying a car’s purpose is to burn gasoline to spin its wheels. That’s what a car does, the purpose of my car is to get me from place to place. The purpose of my friend’s car is to look cool and go fast. The purpose of my uncle’s car is to carry lumber.

I think we more or less agree on the fundamentals and it’s just differences between whether they are referring to a malfunction in the system they are trying to create, in which an LLM is a key tool/component, or a malfunction in the LLM itself. At the end of the day, I think we can all agree that it did a thing they didn’t want it to do, and that an LLM by itself may not be the correct tool for the job.

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- t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  the purpose of my car is to get me from place to place
  
  No, that was the purpose for you, that made you choose to buy it. Someone else could have chosen to buy a car to live in it, for example. The purpose of a tool is just to be a tool. A hammer’s purpose isn’t just to hit nails with, it’s to be a heavy thing you can use as-needed. You could hit a person with it, or straighten out dents in a metal sheet, or destroy a harddrive. I think you’re conflating the intended use of something, with its purpose for existing, and it’s leading you to assert that the purpose of LLMs is one specific use only.
  
  An LLM is never going to be a fact-retrieval engine, but it has plenty of legitimate uses: generating creative text is very useful. Just because OpenAI is selling their creative-text engine under false pretenses doesn’t invalidate the technology itself.
  
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