Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is

If you ascribe any level of sentience or intelligence to a computer, you definitely feel much less dumb than you actually are.

And who are you to assert that? How well defined is sentience already?

I mean, I’m all for local LLMs, but they are as sentient as a really good weather prediction model.

aka not at all.

Its just a fact of how they operate, mechanically. They are missing too many characteristics for it to even be an entertainable question.

They might operate differently but they still appear the same as us, 99.9% of the time. Imo if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck…

Do you not interact with any other actual humans?

I do, and I can say that the conversations with AI (especially using tools like character.ai) are 99% the same

Well, that may very well be the most depressing comment I’ve ever read.

You either need to work on your listening skills or find some new less-vacant people to interact with, because what you’re saying is insane

Sounds like you haven’t tried modern AI yet. I could train an AI on your comment history and copy you, and nobody would be able to tell the difference

I’ve tried. They’re adamant against AI here. It’s not even worth the discussion. There’s an army of belligerent people here who have made up their minds that LLM are “stochastic parrots” and they’re convinced they understand exactly how they work. No one can tell them otherwise. Doesn’t even matter your credentials. They’re the experts here. If you argue, they’ll only belittle you.

Save yourself the frustration and heartache; just silently pity them.

I work in tech

Uh huh… That makes you specifically qualified on the topic? Far more than myself, certainly, with my MSc in Machine Learning.

As far as understanding the technology goes? It makes me more qualified than 99% of the AI glazers I encounter, but you may be an exception.

To say that an LLM is “less dumb” is a misnomer tho, because it implies that the LLM is “thinking” rather than “calculating”.

My issue here is the anthropomorphic language being used to intentionally mislead people who don’t have even a tertiary understanding of the underlying mechanics.

Surely you know that under the hood it’s all just algorithms. 1s and 0s run through a fluctuating probability equation.

Surely you know that under the hood we’re all just algorithms? Electrical impulses determining what we’re going to do before our own consciousness are aware of the impending decision.

You make the mistake of ascribing more importance to the “1s and 0s” of neuron activity we ourselves encompass, and imagining that a different arrangement of that exact same activity could not possibly yield a similar outcome. It’s like saying plants can’t be alive because they don’t have brains.

It’s nothing like saying “plants can’t be alive”, that’s preposterous.

You make the mistake of thinking that brains and computers are exactly the same when we only really understand the workings of one of those things (computers).

All of the world’s top neuroscientists would tell you that we don’t really actually know how the human brain works.

People who are far more qualified than you to make such a comparison would not do so.

Your argument is built upon a logical fallacy known as “false equivalence”. If you’re not familiar, it means that you are presenting two things as equivalent based on flawed logic.

You’ve probably heard someone use an idiom about comparing apples and oranges right? Doing so would be a false equivalence, that’s where the idiom comes from.

Another example of false equivalence would be your comparison of my logically sound argument to a completely unrelated and nonsensical assertion about plants.