Technology

If I think of what causes the average person to consider another to be “smart,” like quickly answering a question about almost any subject, giving lots of detail, and most importantly saying it with confidence and authority, LLMs are great at that shit!

They might be bad reasons to consider a person or thing “smart,” but I can’t say I’m surprised by the results. People can be tricked by a computer for the same reasons they can be tricked by a human.

And you know what? The people who believe that are right.

Note that that’s not a commentary on the capabilities of LLMs.

AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.

Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.

Half of all voters voted for Trump. So an LLM might be smarter than them. Even a bag of pea gravel might be.

This is sad. This does not spark joy. We're months from someone using "but look, ChatGPT says..." To try to win an argument. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that LLMs are really fancy bullshit generator toys.

This is hard to quantify. I use them constantly throughout my work day now.

Are they smarter than me? I'm not sure. Haven't thought too much about it.

What they certainly are, and by a long shot, is faster. Given a set of data, I could analyze it and pull out insights and conclusions. It might take me a week or a month depending on the size and breadth of the data set. An LLM can pull out insights and conclusions in seconds.

I can read error stacks coming from my code, but before I've even read the first few lines the LLM has ingested all of them, checked the code, and reached a conclusion about the necessary fix. Is it right, optimal, and avoid creating other bugs? Like 75% at this point. I can coax it, interate on the solution my self, or do it entirely myself with the understanding of the bug that it granted me. This same bug might have taken hours to figure out myself.

My point is, I'm not sure how to compare smarter vs orders of magnitude faster.

What a very unfortunate name for a university.

The average literacy level is around that of a sixth grader.

This tracks

I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults

LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.

It's probably true too.

Wtf is an llm

That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....

I suppose some of that comes down to the personal understanding of what "smart" is.

I guess you could call some person, that doesn't understand a topic, but still manages to sound reasonable when talking about it, and might even convince people that they actually have a deep understanding of that topic, "smart", in a kind of "smart imposter".

Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.

That's called a self-proving statement.

If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.

It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.

"Half of LLM users " beleive this. Which is not to say that people who understand how flawed LLMs are, or what their actual function is, do not use LLMs and therefore arent i cluded in this statistic?
This is kinda like saying '60% of people who pay for their daily horoscope beleive it is an accurate prediction'.

Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?