alt Hacker NewsIt's the same with human intelligence though. A human can be brilliant on some things and then we're puzzled why they are so idiotic in other areas.
Every time this comes up, people pick on any kind of flaws or inconsistencies of AI models, while at the same time giving a huge pass to the extreme variation in intelligence and stupidness displayed in human behaviour.
Creativity is the same. Human artists are "inspired" by earlier arts, perhaps following and slightly changing "trends" they participate in -- which is somehow seen as totally different from what AIs are doing.
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My problem with AI is the sheer variance of its stupid-smart spectrum. While it's true that human intelligence is not deterministic or predictable, the inconsistency exists in a much narrower band of variance which makes failure modes foreseeable. Thus I would much prefer a system with humans in the loop with processes in place for idiot-proofing.
This is true for "lateral" (I lack a better term) fields of intelligence as well. You don't ask a philosophy professor advice for the rashes on your skin; you see a doctor for that. And yet both the professor and the doctor could be expected to accurately identify from a picture that you do have rashes on your skin. An AI (and I mean in the general sense, not only transformer LLMs) could give you a pretty accurate rundown of Plato and still think the same picture is a beautiful sunrise.
(I don't even kid. Just this morning, an AI labeled a GIF from _Friends_ as a 1950s magazine ad for white bread. Just what in the failure mode is that?)
You can't idiot-proof AI without knowing what's in the training data set and even then you run into question of scale.
> It's the same with human intelligence though.
No, this is not the same observation. In "basic LLM", the answer is not "confused" or "fail to understand", the answer is "inconsistent with the understanding mechanism". It is not that they "fail to understand while trying to understand", it is that there is not understanding mechanism at all.
Humans can have different level of intelligence, depending on the individuals, the subjects, even circumstantial situations (someone being tired, someone being distracted, or just bad luck). But they never make the same kind of mistakes I've observed with "basic LLM", where they do "non sequitur" that does not make sense at all but has all the characteristic of imitating something said by someone who understood.
I still even see it sometimes with Claude. It says logical stuff, and then suddenly something that does not make sense and it snaps me back to reality: none of this, including the correct things, are the result of understanding the underlying concepts, it is just that the correct things are more probable to generate, and that suddenly, a nonsensical happen to also be probable for a given configuration.