Technology

I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults

It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.

That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....

LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.

"Half of LLM users " beleive this. Which is not to say that people who understand how flawed LLMs are, or what their actual function is, do not use LLMs and therefore arent i cluded in this statistic?
This is kinda like saying '60% of people who pay for their daily horoscope beleive it is an accurate prediction'.

This is sad. This does not spark joy. We're months from someone using "but look, ChatGPT says..." To try to win an argument. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that LLMs are really fancy bullshit generator toys.

Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.

If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

That's called a self-proving statement.

Don’t they reflect how you talk to them? Ie: my chatgpt doesn’t have a sense of humor, isn’t sarcastic or sad. It only uses formal language and doesn’t use emojis. It just gives me ideas that I do trial and error with.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

Think of a person with the most average intelligence and realize that 50% of people are dumber than that.

These people vote. These people think billionaires are their friends and will save them. Gods help us.

Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be "information professionals". If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don't know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

This is hard to quantify. I use them constantly throughout my work day now.

Are they smarter than me? I'm not sure. Haven't thought too much about it.

What they certainly are, and by a long shot, is faster. Given a set of data, I could analyze it and pull out insights and conclusions. It might take me a week or a month depending on the size and breadth of the data set. An LLM can pull out insights and conclusions in seconds.

I can read error stacks coming from my code, but before I've even read the first few lines the LLM has ingested all of them, checked the code, and reached a conclusion about the necessary fix. Is it right, optimal, and avoid creating other bugs? Like 75% at this point. I can coax it, interate on the solution my self, or do it entirely myself with the understanding of the bug that it granted me. This same bug might have taken hours to figure out myself.

My point is, I'm not sure how to compare smarter vs orders of magnitude faster.

I'm 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I'm not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.

You say this like this is wrong.

Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.

Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.

Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are... or they're dumb enough to be correct.