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.

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

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.

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

And you know what? The people who believe that are right.

Note that that’s not a commentary on the capabilities of LLMs.

Am American.

....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.

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.

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

moron opens encyclopedia "Wow, this book is smart."

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.

It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses

"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'.

Remember that 54% of adults in American cannot read beyond a 6th grade level, with 21% being fully illiterate.

"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.

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.

The average literacy level is around that of a sixth grader.

This tracks

Next you'll tell me half the population has below average intelligence.

Not really endorsing LLMs, but some people...

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

I know enough people for whom that's true.

LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.

I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults

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

Well, if somebody thinks this, it's kind of true isn't it?

Nearly half of U.S. adults

Half of LLM users (49%)

No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.

LLMs don't even think. Four year olds are more coherent. Given the state of politics, the people thinking LLMs are smarter than them are probably correct.

That's called a self-proving statement.

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.

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

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

They're right

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.

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

i guess the 90% marketing (re: linus torvalds) is working

I wouldn't be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

I don't think a single human who knows as much as chatgpt does exists. Does that mean chatgpt is smarter then everyone? No. Obviously not based on what we've seen so far. But the amount of information available to these LLMs is incredible and can be very useful. Like a library contains a lot of useful information but isn't intelligent itself.

Nearly half of llm users are dumber than they seem

Just a thought, perhaps instead of considering the mental and educational state of the people without power to significantly affect this state, we should focus on the people who have power.

For example, why don't LLM providers explicitly and loudly state, or require acknowledgement, that their products are just imitating human thought and make significant mistakes regularly, and therefore should be used with plenty of caution?

It's a rhetorical question, we know why, and I think we should focus on that, not on its effects. It's also much cheaper and easier to do than refill years of quality education in individuals heads.

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.

While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.

There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.

Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?

I wasn't sure from the title if it was "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are." or "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are." It's the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.

Either way, I'm not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn't answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they're generally good at meeting what people's expectations are of a "smart person", even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.

The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.

"US".... Even LLM won't vote for Trump

Considering the amount of people that either voted trump or not voted at all, I'd say that there's a portion of americans lying.

For anyone wondering.

LLM=Large Language Model

Maybe if the adults actually didn't use the LLMs so much this wouldn't be the case.

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.

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.

What that overwhelming, uncritical, capitalist propaganda do...

An llm simply has remembered facts. If that is smart, then sure, no human can compete.

Now ask an llm to build a house. Oh shit, no legs and cant walk. A human can walk without thinking about it even.

In the future though, there will be robots who can build houses using AI models to learn from. But not in a long time.

What a very unfortunate name for a university.

AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.

At least half of US adults think that they themselves are smarter than they actually are, so this tracks.

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.

As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of "smarter" was left to the respondents, and "answers as if it knows many things that I don't know" is certainly a reasonable definition -- even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn't know anything.

As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty "smart":

what's a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn't want to use "subjects" because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

"Respondents" is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

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.

It's probably true too.

Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?

I suppose some of that comes down to the personal understanding of what "smart" is.

I guess you could call some person, that doesn't understand a topic, but still manages to sound reasonable when talking about it, and might even convince people that they actually have a deep understanding of that topic, "smart", in a kind of "smart imposter".

Even if an ai has access to more facts and information you should feel confident in your human ability to reason through the data you do know, search new information and process it in the context.

If you think an ai does all this better than you then you need to try harder.

An LLM is roughly as smart as the corpus it is summarizing is accurate for the topic, because at their best they are good at creating natural language summarizers. Most of the main ones basically do an internet search and summarize the top couple of results, which means they are as good as the search engine backing them. Which is good enough for a lot of topics, but...not so much for the rest.

Ask an LLM what is affected by tariffs

only boomers and tech-unsavy people think that.

LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent

Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don't understand how LLMs work or what's actually going on at the frontier of the field.

I feel like there's going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.

They are. Unless you can translate what I'm saying to any language I tell you to on the fly, I'm going to assume that anyone that tells me they are smarter than LLMs are lower on the spectrum than usual. Wikipedia and a lot of libraries are also more knowledgeable than me, who knew. If I am grateful for one thing, it is that I am not one of those people whose ego has to be jizzing everywhere, including their perception of things.