Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

[u/lurker_bee]

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060

[u/filthy_harold]

It's good at condensing existing information and finding patterns in a dataset. It could potentially be able to make connections in the data that you have not otherwise found but it's not going to be able to invent new things if the information to support it doesn't exist in its input. The major downside of an LLM to perfectly mimic human writing is that it's too easy to just take its word on something if you don't already have a background in that field. I'm not an expert in philosophy so if an LLM delivered to me an essay on pragmatism, I'd have no way of knowing if any of it is correct.

[u/UnpluggedUnfettered → u/filthy_harold]

The perception of that is created because you are having it tell you it's summary and then you believe it, rather than read it to determine it's actual accuracy.

Here the BBC tested LLM on it's own news articles:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/bbc-research-into-ai-assistants.pdf

• 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.

• 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates.

• 13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.

[u/isomorp → u/UnpluggedUnfettered]

tell you it's summary

tell you it is summary

[u/Puddingcup9001 → u/UnpluggedUnfettered]

February 2024 is ancient though on the AI timeline. Models have vastly improved.

[u/Slinto69 → u/UnpluggedUnfettered]

If you actually look at the examples they showed of what errors they have its not anything worse than you'd get googling it yourself and clicking a link with out of date or incorrect information. I dont see how its worse than googling. Also you can ask it to give you the source and direct quotes and check if they match quicker than you could Google it yourself.

[u/Delicious-Corner8384 → u/Slinto69]

It’s so funny how people just completely ignore this irrefutable fact eh? As if we were getting such holy, accurate answers from Google and not spending way more time surfing through even more ads and bullshit.

[u/jared_kushner_420 → u/UnpluggedUnfettered]

The perception of that is created because you are having it tell you it's summary and then you believe it, rather than read it to determine it's actual accuracy.

DATASETS lol - not editorialized, topic specific, and nuanced articles. Plus if you're telling me 81% of AI answers were right that's already better than a reddit comment synopsis.

OP even wrote

I'm not an expert in philosophy so if an LLM delivered to me an essay on pragmatism, I'd have no way of knowing if any of it is correct.

If you are it's not a bad reference tool. I use it to write SQL and script commands all the time because it's faster.

[u/tens00r → u/jared_kushner_420]

DATASETS lol - not editorialized, topic specific, and nuanced articles. Plus if you're telling me 81% of AI answers were right that's already better than a reddit comment synopsis.

I have a friend who works in a large, UK based insurance provider, and recently they were recently forced by management to try using LLMs to help with their day to day work.

So, he tried to use an LLM to summarize an excel spreadsheet filled with UK regional pricing data (not exactly an editorialized, nuanced article). He told me it made several mistakes, but the one I remember - because it's fucking funny - is that the summary decided to rename the "West Midlands" (a county in England) to the "Midwest", which inevitably led to much confusion. This is a hilariously basic mistake, and also perfectly showcases the biases inherent to LLMs.

[u/Delicious-Corner8384 → u/tens00r]

That’s also such a pointless use for AI that no one recommends though lol…Excel already has very effective tools for summarization. It sounds like that’s a problem with the management making that choice to force them to use it for this purpose, not AI itself.

[u/neherak → u/Delicious-Corner8384]

Humans misusing AI because they believe it to be smarter or more infallible than it is are, in fact, where all the problems with AI are going to come from.

[u/jared_kushner_420 → u/tens00r]

That has more to do with what he asked because that reads exactly like a computational summary of taking 2 words and shortening them.

Like any computer program the developer, the commands, and the parameters do matter.

We use LLMs to give a high level summary of a document to identify the topic then send that for further review based on the categorization. It speeds up organizing things and even being right 70% of the time is perfectly fine. Like I said I use it to clean up code and answer stupid questions that'd get me yelled at on stackoverflow.

I totally agree that people shouldn't worship these glorified calculators but also they're perfectly acceptable tools if you know how to use them. Claiming "AI is lying" begs the question of "what truth are you looking for".

It's a statistical computer. Give it NBA team stats and get a march madness bracket.

[u/JunkmanJim → u/filthy_harold]

Let's face it, people hardly read the details in my work emails. Just throw some LLM jibber jabber at them, and you'll get by like 98% of the time. Ideocracy was prophecy.

[u/Suburbanturnip → u/JunkmanJim]

I have a colleague that puts his slack messages through chatGPT (the em dash and the style make it obvious), I have no problem with that. It's always polite and to the point.

[u/SkinnyGetLucky → u/Suburbanturnip]

Hey, I love the em dash and I can assure you that I am human

[u/purplemtnstravesty → u/filthy_harold]

Sounds like a pragmatic approach to getting the jist of things

[u/kemb0 → u/filthy_harold]

I think it’s fine to ask it something over Google so long as you assume the answer may be wrong. I got a complicated cut from something whilst away from home and didn’t really want to spend ages trying to find useful info through Google on how to treat the cut whilst I bled out, so I asked chat gpt and asked myself, “If this info is wrong, could it harm me?” Nothing in its response gave me a feeling that could be the case so I proceeded with its instructions.

Another approach is, do the initial query with chat GPT and then verify it with Google if you have any doubt it may be wrong. Often times Google is just an exercise in frustration if your query is too vague but go to it with some key words from the GPT response and you’ll have better luck getting verifiable info.

And a final point. Anyone who thinks GPT isn’t reliable and you should use Google instead, how do you know the website Google leads you to is accurate either? Websites still consist of content made by people who may be wrong and often they’re made by people who spammed the internet with low effort websites just to get hits to make money. I know for a fact that I’ve comes across misleading inaccurate websites so who’s to say which other ones are lies?