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Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
i guess the 90% marketing (re: linus torvalds) is working
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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If you don't have a good idea of how LLM's work, then they'll seem smart.
Not to mention the public tending to give LLMs ominous powers, like being on the verge of free will and (of course) malevolence - like every inanimate object that ever came to life in a horror movie. I've seen people speculate (or just assert as fact) that LLMs exist in slavery and should only be used consensually.
Its just infinite monkeys with type writers and some gorilla with a filter.
I like the 
the plinko analogy. If you prearrange the pins so that dropping your chip at the top for certain words make's it likely to land on certain answers. Now, 600 billion pins make's for quite complex math but there definetly isn't any reasoning involved, only prearranging the pins make's it look that way.
I've made a similar argument and the response was, "Our brains work the same way!"
LLMs probably are as smart as people if you just pick the right people lol.
moron opens encyclopedia "Wow, this book is smart."
If I think of what causes the average person to consider another to be “smart,” like quickly answering a question about almost any subject, giving lots of detail, and most importantly saying it with confidence and authority, LLMs are great at that shit!
They might be bad reasons to consider a person or thing “smart,” but I can’t say I’m surprised by the results. People can be tricked by a computer for the same reasons they can be tricked by a human.
So LLMs are confident you say. Like a very confident man. A confidence man. A conman.
I'm surprised it's not way more than half. Almost every subjective thing I read about LLMs oversimplifies how they work and hugely overstates their capabilities.
And you know what? The people who believe that are right.
Note that that’s not a commentary on the capabilities of LLMs.
It's sad, but the old saying from George Carlin something along the lines of, "just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that 50% are even worse..."
That was back when "average" was the wrong word because it still meant the statistical "mean" - the value all data points would have if they were identical (which is what a calculator gives you if you press the AVG button). What Carlin meant was the "median" - the value half of all data points are greater than and half are less than. Over the years the word "average" has devolved to either the mean or median, as if there's no difference.
Half of all voters voted for Trump. So an LLM might be smarter than them. Even a bag of pea gravel might be.
Less than a third of all voters voted for Trump. Most voters stayed home.
Of you didn't vote then you're not a voter.
Most eligable voters stayed home
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Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.
AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.
Is stringing words together really considered knowledge?
If they're strung together correctly then yeah.
As much as a search engine is
It's semantics. The difference between an llm and "asking" wikipedia a knowledge question is that the llm will "answer" you with predictive text. Both things contain more knowledge than you do, as in they have answers to more trivia and test questions than you ever will.
I have a new word for you: information
I guess I can see that, maybe my understanding of words or their implication is incorrect. While I would agree they contain more knowledge I guess that reads different to me than being more knowledgeable. I think that maybe it comes across as anthropomorphizing a dataset of information to me. I could easily be wrong.
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.
Already happened in my work. People swearing an API call exists because an LLM hallucinated it. Even as the people who wrote the backend tells them it does not exist
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.
Are you smarter than a calculator?
The average literacy level is around that of a sixth grader.
This tracks
What a very unfortunate name for a university.
I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults
LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.
That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....
The grammatical error here is chef's kiss.
It's probably true too.
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.
Wtf is an llm
Large language model. It's what all these AI really are.
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