• knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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    1 month ago

    LLMs arent “bad” (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

    “Analysis” is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can’t even count, ask it how many 'e’s are in “elephant” and you’ll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

    This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they’ll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.

    • howrar
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      1 month ago

      LLMs cannot:

      • Tell fact from fiction
      • Accurately recall data from its training set
      • Count

      LLMs can

      • Translate
      • Get the general vibe of a text (sentiment analysis)
      • Generate plausible text

      Semantics aside, they’re very different skills that require different setups to accomplish. Just because counting is an easier task than analysing text for humans, doesn’t mean it’s the same it’s the same for a LLM. You can’t use that as evidence for its inability to do the “harder” tasks.