Technology

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

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.

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.

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".

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

I'm 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I'm not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.

They're right

Wtf is an llm

Think of a person with the most average intelligence and realize that 50% of people are dumber than that.

These people vote. These people think billionaires are their friends and will save them. Gods help us.

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.

Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?

Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are... or they're dumb enough to be correct.

Am American.

....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.

LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.

It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses

"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.

There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.