Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

AI - stupid and hallucinating?

Firstly, what is this hallucinating? "It's important to note that hallucination is a feature, not a bug, of AI," Sohrob Kazerounian, an AI researcher at Vectra AI, told Live Science. "To paraphrase a colleague of mine, 'Everything an LLM outputs is a hallucination. It's just that some of those hallucinations are true.' If an AI only generated verbatim outputs that it had seen during training, all of AI would reduce to a massive search problem."
So, the take-home message is that whatever AI generates needs to be tested/verified -- but not just blank discarded.

Second, whether we like it or not AI is here to stay. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, recently said that as much as 30% of Microsoft's code is written by AI. Beyond the help that LLMs like ChatGPT offer for routine tasks, there are serious, important advances in many fields from AI - see Quanta's recent issue on AI in science at https://www.quantamagazine.org/series/science-in-the-age-of-ai/

New technologies are rarely fully formed at the start and there is always some hesitancy to adopting them. If it makes you feel better, Socrates (no less!) objected to writing because he felt that would undercut our ability to remember things - see https://williamdare.com/2012/04/26/socrates-oral-and-written-communication-or-why-socrates-never-wrote-anything-down

There are lots of important questions about how we 'deal with ' AI -- philosophical, political, economic, computational and cybersecurity questions, as well as implications for investing. But dismissing it as 'stupid' is burying your head in the sand.

Comments

  • edited July 2
    This is a fascinating topic and it would be great if we could have an in-depth conversation by some posters who are qualified by background, experience or training in the relevant areas.
Sign In or Register to comment.