this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Half of LLM users (49%) think the models they use are smarter than they are, including 26% who think their LLMs are “a lot smarter.” Another 18% think LLMs are as smart as they are. Here are some of the other attributes they see:

  • Confident: 57% say the main LLM they use seems to act in a confident way.
  • Reasoning: 39% say the main LLM they use shows the capacity to think and reason at least some of the time.
  • Sense of humor: 32% say their main LLM seems to have a sense of humor.
  • Morals: 25% say their main model acts like it makes moral judgments about right and wrong at least sometimes. Sarcasm: 17% say their prime LLM seems to respond sarcastically.
  • Sad: 11% say the main model they use seems to express sadness, while 24% say that model also expresses hope.
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[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 24 points 11 hours ago

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

This tracks

[–] curiousaur@reddthat.com 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 16 points 11 hours ago

I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults

[–] tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] CalipherJones@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

Is stringing words together really considered knowledge?

[–] CalipherJones@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

If they're strung together correctly then yeah.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 hours ago

As much as a search engine is

[–] Donkter@lemmy.world 0 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

It's semantics. The difference between an llm and "asking" wikipedia a knowledge question is that the llm will "answer" you with predictive text. Both things contain more knowledge than you do, as in they have answers to more trivia and test questions than you ever will.

[–] Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 hours ago

I guess I can see that, maybe my understanding of words or their implication is incorrect. While I would agree they contain more knowledge I guess that reads different to me than being more knowledgeable. I think that maybe it comes across as anthropomorphizing a dataset of information to me. I could easily be wrong.

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[–] ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

What a very unfortunate name for a university.

[–] MrAlternateTape@lemm.ee 19 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 14 points 12 hours ago

The grammatical error here is chef's kiss.

[–] interested_party@lemmy.org 2 points 8 hours ago

It's probably true too.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 15 points 14 hours ago

That's called a self-proving statement.

[–] tad_lispy@lemm.ee 16 points 14 hours ago

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

[–] Grizzlyboy@lemm.ee 36 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 19 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

„It‘s totally a lot smarter than I am, no way could I deliver (234 * 534)^21 as confidently!“

[–] stochastic_parrot@sh.itjust.works 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Are you suggesting my 90's calculator is smarter than LLM's?

[–] Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 10 points 16 hours ago

Hard to compete with that 90s confidence 😎

[–] Naevermix@lemmy.world 14 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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

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[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.

[–] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 32 points 17 hours ago

"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'.

[–] cmhe@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

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".

[–] jh29a@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] Retropunk64@lemmy.world 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] the_q@lemm.ee 2 points 7 hours ago

Large language model. It's what all these AI really are.

[–] blady_blah@lemmy.world 14 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

You say this like this is wrong.

Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

A good example is the post on here about tax brackets. Far more Republicans didn't know how tax brackets worked than Democrats. But every mainstream language model would have gotten the answer right.

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I bet the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs

[–] JacksonLamb@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago (9 children)

Memory isn't intelligence.

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[–] Akuchimoya@startrek.website 26 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (7 children)

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be "information professionals". If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don't know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

[–] ricecooker@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 hours ago

People need to understand it's a really well-trained parrot that has no idea what is saying. That's why it can give you chicken recipes and software code; it's seen it before. Then it uses statistics to put words together that usually appear together. It's not thinking at all despite LLMs using words like "reasoning" or "thinking"

[–] Arkouda@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 hours ago

Librarians went to school to learn how to keep order in a library. That does not inherently make them have more information in their heads than the average person, especially regarding things that aren't books and book organization.

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