[chpatrick]

Sure, it's only as good as the training data. But human experts also output tokens with some statistical distribution. That doesn't mean anything.

[Zigurd]

That sounds plausible. But it doesn't explain why LLM's make laughably bad errors that even a biased and haphazard human researcher wouldn't make.

[Zigurd]

Gemini seems to have a user interface that, for the way most people encounter Gemini, is more closely linked to search results. This leads me to suspect that Google's approach to training could be uniquely informed by both current and historic web crawling.

[chpatrick]

I think that's been a lot less true over the last year or so. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the first LLM I actually find pretty damn reliable.

[contagiousflow]

If you think talking to an LLM is the same experience as talking to a human you should probably talk to more humans

[chpatrick]

That's not what I said. What I said is that the claim "LLMs aren't intelligent because they stochastically produce characters" doesn't hold because humans do that too even if they're intelligent and authorative.

[krapp]

We don't actually know how human cognition works, so how do you know that humans "stochastically produce characters?"

[chpatrick]

Do humans always answer exactly the same way to the same question? No.

Also you could always pick the most likely token in an LLM as well to make it deterministic if you really wanted.

[krapp]

That doesn't really prove anything. I could create a Markov chain with a random seed that doesn't always answer the same question the same way, but that doesn't prove the human brain works like a Markov chain with a random seed.

One thing humans tend not to do is confabulate entirely to the degree that LLMs do. When humans do so, it's considered a mental illness. Simply saying the same thing in a different way is not the same as randomly randomly syntactically correct nonsense. Most humans will not, now and then, answer that 2 + 2 = 5, or that the sun rises in the southeast.

[chpatrick]

I'm not making any claim about how the human brain works. The only thing I'm saying is that humans also produce somewhat randomized output for the same question, which is pretty uncontroversial I think. That doesn't mean they're unintelligent. Same for LLMs.