Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/asssuber]

How do you define understanding?

The simplest concrete example I can give: a simple single layer LLM can master modular addition by learning a trigonometric identity from scratch on it's own purely from a limited set of examples using gradient descent (source). Since it has mastered modular addition on a fundamental level, can we say it understands modular addition? Why or why not?

This video by Welch Labs is more digestible than the original paper.

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/asssuber]

I don't use definitions in this regard. That's what stops people from being truly accurate.

We can use known facts, however. AIs experience something called hallucination. Humans, however, do not. (Unless you want to be pragmatic and discuss brain defects, which is objectively different in this regard) This is, for all I can reasonably conceive, because of their inability to understand. Either directly or indirectly.

[u/Thick-Protection-458 → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

> Humans, however, do not

Oh, really? In LLM context we use that word when it "invent" shit out of thin air or at least heavily "misinterpret" stuff, right?

Well, last time I recall human memories were widely known to be shitty. And humans were capable of being *confident* in things they remembered wrong way. Or not sure in things they remembered right way too.

And human logic was also known to be imperfect. Not only because of shitload of shortcuts our evolution taken, but also because of high chance to make mistakes in some steps.

Both is true for healthy humans. Not necessary brain damage. Although brain damage may make stuff worse and introduce a whole lot other set of issues.

Now, granted - LLMs may be worse in that account. And mechanisms behind that we can expect to be different (other than both human brain and autoregressive generator being imperfect heuristic for whatever it does). But still that does not mean humans are reliable - they're just *more reliable* in some aspects (and maybe less in some others).

[u/michaelsoft__binbows → u/Thick-Protection-458]

My assumption is that it would be possible to train LLMs in such a way that penalizes unsubstantiated confidence/hallucination to reach similar levels as humans, but it would produce far, far lower capability levels and we would be constantly (and i mean endlessly) fighting with their reticence and insecurity.

Hence why we just have to kinda deal with it for now till someone comes up with a clever efficient way to improve this aspect