[wkat4242]

What's not 'safe' about AI?

If you mean the hallucinations I don't think that will ever really be solved. I think people just have to learn that LLMs are not divine oracles that are always correct. Just like the training data generated by the flawed humans that are often either wrong or outright lying.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Not saying that AI isn't useful. But expecting what is basically a "human simulator" not to inherit humanity's flaws is a bit disingenious.

[Gormo]

> If you mean the hallucinations I don't think that will ever really be solved.

This is true by definition, since a 'hallucination' isn't a failure condition in which the system isn't working as designed, it's just a post-hoc term for when probabilistic output doesn't meet our expectations, which is inherent to the nature of all probabilistic systems.

Within the system, there is no distinction between 'hallucination' and 'non-hallucination'.LLMs are applying the same stochastic process in all cases, and the criteria of whether we call its output a 'hallucination' is entirely external to their functioning.

Strictly speaking, LLMs are always hallucinating, since they are always generating inferences based on hard-coded statistical models and have no awareness of the semantic meaning of the tokens they correlate, nor any internal criteria of external correctness.

> I think people just have to learn that LLMs are not divine oracles that are always correct.

We all need to keep repeating the mantra "all models are wrong; some models are useful."

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

>have no awareness of the semantic meaning of the tokens they correlate

This seems impossible to me. Many of the tasks I use GPT for inherently require understanding and thinking.

[Gormo]

And that understanding and thinking is coming from you. GPT is just generating text based on statistical correlations between tokens.

[decide1000]

It is kinda hard to grasp but an llm does not 'think'. It basically predicts the next letter in a sentence and it's quite efficient at it.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

That's not really a satisfying answer. I could say human brains don't really think, they're just transmitting electrical signals in a saline suspension. Technically true, but it ignores the larger emergent behavior.

[Gormo]

It may not be a satisfying answer, but it is a correct one.

The comparison to the underpinnings of human cognition are not really valid, because regardless of the underlying substrate, human beings are indeed building mental models of reality itself via sensory input, so even if human minds and LLMs operated on the exact same process of inference (which we cannot state with confidence is true), then human minds would be generating inferences based on correlations of actual empirical experience, whereas LLMs are only building correlations between words, regardless of what empirical reality those words may or may not correspond to.

So all else being equal, human minds are modeling reality, while LLMs are modeling another model.

[wkat4242]

Yes I always have to explain this to people too. It's hard because it's extremely good at predending it can think :)