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Nate Gaylinn
Nate Gaylinn
@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

I appreciate videos like this one from Nature that collect expert viewpoints, but sometimes the experts should be challenged.

Jared Kaplan of Anthropic had some very misleading claims.

LLMs do not democratize access to expertise. It feels like that because they sounds like an expert, but only when you ask them questions in domains you don't know. Really, they're just making shit up, and you don't notice in areas you're not an expert in.

LLMs will not solve open problems in STEM. Researchers may use machine learning tools to do that, but ML is for finding patterns in data. It can't "solve" or make "insights." It only applies when we already have vast amounts of the right kind of data.

And if we want to talk about LLMs as a cybersecurity threat, we should talk about how vulnerable they are to attackers. Imagining a genius AI hacker is nothing more than a distraction!

#llm #ai

Russell Ackoff - U.S. Navy two day training in Thinking, Understanding, and Learning (1 of 8)
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Anthony
Anthony
@abucci@buc.ci replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago
@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt I wouldn't call someone from Anthropic an expert. They're a businessperson with significant amounts of money, reputation and their own livelihood on the line. We need to get out of the mode of ignoring deep conflicts of interest like this, especially when they seem to be driving the viewpoints expressed.
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Nate Gaylinn
Nate Gaylinn
@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

@abucci Yeah, I agree.

The problem is that Anthropic really is a leader in this field, and we ought to care who they put up as their "expert." That perspective is very relevant! But we ought to be challenging that person's credentials, and explicitly contrasting them with an outside expert's opinion, since they have a clear conflict of interest.

Nature... sorta tried to do that? They did at least get some good independent voices. But they didn't allow any critique, just... putting out a variety of opinions, for viewers to make up their own minds.

That's not journalism, and it's not science, and that's a shame because Nature ought to be good at both.

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Anthony
Anthony
@abucci@buc.ci replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago
@ngaylinn@tech.lgbt Yes. It's partly why I'm so critical: Nature has played a large role in uncritically spreading AI disinformation. Till they reined it in arXiv did too. Corporate marketing in a lab coat is still corporate marketing, and I don't think scientific publishing platforms should be publishing it next to scientific communication as if these two forms of communication are of a piece. I also think crithype is a real phenomenon. There are ways to present a fuller picture of a technology, including the voices from corporate labs while staying within the bounds of the scientific, but it seems Nature has chosen not to do that, at least as far as I can see.
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