• unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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    17 hours ago

    machine learning

    Uh… What exactly do you think LLMs are? Christ, people will jump through any hoop to delineate “thing I hate” from “thing I hate but is too useful so I must find a way that it’s different so I can like it”.

    Machine learning, including LLMs, are a technology. They are a tool, and can be used for good or ill. All this hatred towards the technology, instead of the salesmen burning our world over it, baffles me.

    Do you know what I used AI for the other day? I wanted to try a new store so I booted up my local AI and I had it search for whether the owners have donated to anyone or anything I’d consider a problem. It looked through news stories, the website and wayback machine, public FEC filings, and on and on. In a matter of minutes I had a pretty comprehensive report and was good to go about my day, decision on relatively sound data in hand. Without AI, I’d have spent several times as long and not found half as much… Or, I just wouldn’t have checked at all.

    It’s a technology, and its useful. It saved a man’s sight, here, and it’s researching new compounds to save more lives. It’s also being used for war, and crime, and a lot of research was done unethically. But it’s okay to like the good things it’s used for, because a lot of people are using it to help.

    • TheFogan@programming.dev
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      17 hours ago

      The point is, they are using the functional specialized machine learning systems, as a way to justify building thousand of data centers to build LLMs.

      • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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        17 hours ago

        I don’t disagree with this as a statement of the strategy the broligarchs are employing (that’s the “burning our world” bit), but my point is purely about the technology itself, and how batshit insane it is to try and maintain one kind of ML is not really ML because icky. All the “AI” that people hate on so blindly is a lot more than image and text generation, but it’s all Machine Learning.

    • gastroglizzy@piefed.social
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      17 hours ago

      What exactly do YOU think LLMs are?

      Machine Learning is a kind of AI. LLMs are but one kind of Machine Learning Model. All LLMs are Machine Learning models, but not all Machine Learning models are LLMs. LLMs are one kind of AI, but not all AI is an LLM.

      They’re different words for a reason. If they were all the same thing, we wouldn’t give them different names. It’s completely possible and understandable that someone would find one acceptable but not the other.

      Sources:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model

      There’s nothing quite so uniquely irritating as someone who holds a strong opinion on something about which they know very little.

      • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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        17 hours ago

        I believe you’ll find I said

        Machine learning, including LLMs, are a technology.

        Because LLMs are a subset of ML models. I never said all ML is LLMs, but the person I’m responding to doesn’t seem to understand that LLMs are trained via Machine Learning. Thanks for the misplaced condescension though, looks real good on you.

    • PurpleFanatic@quokk.au
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      15 hours ago

      But did you double check what it generated about the sources? These LLMs are vastly prone to lying about things. Which is why I feel like they’re nearly completely useless.

      If I have to treat everything it says as a lie, especially if it won’t source or substantiate its claims, then what good is it? If I have to manually verify everything, I may as well look it up myself.

      • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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        6 hours ago

        Ah, but that’s just it. You can make it source and cite its claims, with deeplinks, and you simply don’t believe anything it said that wasn’t supported by the sources that it collected and presented to you.

        But Jesus Christ my dude, the article we’re talking about is about this technology, machine learning, saving a man’s sight during surgery. And what are people doing? Saying how much they hate “AI”, but not this because it’s machine learning which is somehow different than AI 🌈

        I doubt the surgeon would say it’s useless. I doubt the guy who can still see would say it’s useless.

        Blows my fuckin’ mind, man.

    • one_old_coder@piefed.social
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      17 hours ago

      LLM is

      trained on a vast amount of text for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation

      So… not related to the kind of AI mentioned in the article. You’re the one who talked about LLMs and I don’t know why.

      • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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        5 hours ago

        I’m going to respond again here so you see it. You copied some of Wikipedia, congratulations, but you conveniently left out the bit that proves you wrong:

        LLMs are Neural Networks. What does Wikipedia have to say about neural networks? Why, they’re part of the field of Machine Learning!

      • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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        17 hours ago

        Because it’s machine learning. That’s the premise of the very first sentence I wrote. Are you sure you haven’t surrendered all your thinking to the machine?

        • one_old_coder@piefed.social
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          17 hours ago

          What exactly do you think LLMs are

          LLM and ML are very different.

          Are you sure you haven’t surrendered all your thinking to the machine?

          I don’t use AI because it sucks.

          • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.ca
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            6 hours ago

            LLM and ML are very different.

            No, they’re not. Any line you try to draw between them is a lie you’ve convinced yourself of. There’s no arguing with a take this detached from reality, though.

            Edit: Okay smartarse, go ahead and explain how LLMs are not products of machine learning technology. Explain how these two things are unrelated. You’re going to have to actually learn about training transformer layers to make any kind of argument, so you’re going to pretty quickly realise you’re entirely fucking wrong, and then you can scurry off to not acknowledge it here.