Gives me the ick. Serious Trump vibes.

The whole "daddy, please tell the bodyguards to bonk me, they're refusing because they think you'll sack them!" thing and the "daddy please can I bonk one of your middle aged chums?" stuff is all more than weird to me.

She comes across as happy and knowing exactly what she wants, so that's a positive, but I think her dad has a very weak 'no' game and has had for years and years. Not everything that we want at 18 is good for us. Only a handful of months ago she was a literal child.

OP is only recently 18. Sexual partner is over 50. It's not 100% sunshine and roses.

What makes you think it was the pedestrians on their phones?

My EV is easily and by far the best and most fun to drive (and cheapest to run) car I've ever owned.

Absolutely my favourite vehicle to drive ever, easily more fun to drive than a lovely automatic petrol BMW I borrowed a couple of times.

If any fuckers want to make what I’m doing illegal, people will die.

All the shit going on in the USA just now and this is what drives you to murder?

(I assumed you're American because of the culturally dominant idea that it's ok to shoot people if it grants you a bit more personal liberty.)

Before the EU legislated that banks should all make it easy to automatically transfer all bill payments etc over to a new current account, you would need to set these up yourself on your new account. There's only one reason really that you would ask for all of that information, and the bank knew I was taking physical action to leave them.

When the lion is explaining what's best for the giraffes, do the opposite.

invalid criticisms like “they are just stochastic parrots”

That's not a criticism per se, it's a description of how they work.

What do you mean LLMs don’t learn? How do you think they became capable of stringing a sentence together?

You're confusing constructing the LLM, which is done with an actual AI (neural network) and a massive corpus of text (stolen from millions of humans in the greatest intellectual theft in history) and running the LLM, which is done with a random number generator and a massive matrix of probable next words.

They don’t learn during a deployment,

They don't learn. They don't change. They're as random next time as this time.

but neither do humans; humans only learn during sleep.

False and false. Soooo much pseudoscience.

The behaviors a human exhibits while “learning” in the moment are just stochastic parrot behaviors

Wrong again.

if the human doesn’t sleep in time the event can slip out of their context window and they don’t learn despite having acted as if they do.

If that were true, most people would learn very badly first thing in the morning and get better and better later in the day. I think you'll find that most school teachers would vehemently disagree with your nonsense conclusions.

Then again, perhaps by "doesn't sleep in time" you mean stays up all night, then admittedly they might function less well cognitively but (a) we tend not to regularly torture humans that way and (b) you're massively overstating the role of sleep in the learning process.

You seem to be very naive about human learning in general.

No, you seem to be very naive indeed, to extremes, about the intelligence and reliability of LLMs. When I ask them about general things that I know about, I tend to get the right answer about 60%-70% of the time. Why would I believe it when I didn't know the answer. To trust an LLM to tell you the truth about stuff you aren't checking when it clearly blags nonsense so frequently when you are is really really stupid.

What makes the “truth” of school lessons greater than the “truth” of an LLM’s curated dataset it is reinforcement learned on?

Most teachers tend to consistently teach the content of the syllabus rather than randomise what they say to classes based on the preceding conversation. They reinforce and update their prior knowledge by also learning from the mark schemes of the tests and exams their students sit.

Have you ever seen actual evidence that mitochondria exist, or are you just stochastically parroting your biology teacher?

No. I trust my teachers. I am rational to do so. I don't trust LLMs. You are irrational to do so.

But please oppose it with arguments based in reality.

You are utterly deluded and have bought the hype. You seem unable to distinguish between distinct things and are dismissing a large amount of evidence that your "just as good as a human" is a crap-spewing shit machine, no more honest than donald J trump, and with no less sharting.

It's not surprising, except for the fact that it's not international news.

something very weird is going on.

It's called zoom.

you should have the same deep moral concerns about turning off a computer running a local LLM as you do over forcing a person into a coma whenever convenient

I do, actually. I don’t think LLMs are as sentient as adult humans, and maybe they aren’t sentient at all, but one of the reasons I oppose AI structurally and why I never use AI even if I think it would be convenient is veganism.

Ah. Right. Umm. I think I'm done now.

Have a great weekend.

Brain behaviour is a big influence and inspiration on how machine learning techniques are designed.

I repeat, the LLM is not doing machine learning while users are using it.

This isn’t to say LLMs are trustworthy or reliable. They are not.

We agree here.

More that humans think much more highly of themselves than is really warranted.

And we agree here too, but to trust an LLM to tell you the truth on your question that you don't know the answer is like trusting some random drunk at the pub, because you don't know whether the answer is from an LLM hallucination, a random lie/error on reddit or an expert's contribution to wikipedia.

And to trust an LLM when there's a trained programmer or professional journalist is stupid. Sure, an LLM might even sometimes write as good or better code than an intern, but again, the LLM is not learning from its mistakes as you correct it. The intern gradually becomes an expert. The LLM does not. Paying interns is an investment in future programmers, who get more expensive the more experienced they are.

The LLM is currently cheaper than the intern, but LLM pricing needs to go up by a factor of about ten to cover running costs let alone pay off the vastly more immense debts of buying all that hardware.

Sleep is generally understood physiologically to be required to formulate long term memory (eg. as described in this paper).

Like I said before, humans sleep every night, with rare exceptions. LLMs do not get retrained every night. The human brain adapts to feedback loops during everyday interactions, not just overnight. It's a silly analogy and this is a silly point to defend.

There are plenty of textbooks that say that volatile running RAM is like short term memory and hard disks and SSDs are like long term memory, but it would be silly to reverse the analogy as you are doing and claim that sleep is pressing the save button on the day's learning, or that this makes your word processor the same as your human intelligence because, and this is the central point you've been trying to argue around and about and against, they're doing fundamentally different things, and telling me one was inspired by the other doesn't change that. An LLM is fundamentally a stochastic regurgitator whose training is designed primarily to make it sound right. A human brain just doesn't work that way.

If you truly believe that the LLM is learning like a human or intelligent like a human, you are confusing analogies for reality.

Humans are animals. LLMs randomly generate text based on the corpus they were trained on and the conversation so far, so stochastic parrot is an accurate description.

LLMs don't learn. Humans do. LLMs generate text randomly using a massive matrix. Humans don't; you lied. An LLM is incapable of lying because it has no understanding of truth. It just bullshits convincingly all the time. It's very very good at it, but it's all hallucinated for the LLM, true or false.

Expecting your random word generator to tell you truths is insane. The training measure is "sounds right" not "is right". It passes if it sounds like the other discourse it read. Just like the confident drunk guy at the pub who thinks he knows everything passes of he convinces the other drunk guys at the pub.

Whereas humans learn at school and on the job and the training measure is "your teacher or supervisor approves". LLMs were not trained on truth or accuracy. Trusting in them and treating them as equivalent to human intelligence, as you and a whole bunch of other folks do, is profoundly unsound, and soon the necessary price rises to pay for the processing costs (let alone the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast debts on the infrastructure) are going to make most slophouses which jettisoned their human talent go out of business. And very, very few people indeed will be sorry at that point.

Meanwhile LLM slop is shitting in github all day long, every day, and shitting on the internet, and it will eat it's own shit and produce crappier shit.

Your analogies don't change the truth, and that is that LLMs don't know the difference between sounds correct and is correct any more than MAGA voters know the difference between sounds good to me and is good for me.

My previous bank was messing me around and making things awkward for me, so I rang them up and told them they needed to fix it to go back to the way I wanted, or I was taking our current account and savings accounts elsewhere. They just told me they couldn't by policy. I made a complaint. They said they couldn't by policy.

I did my research over the next couple of weeks and then I walked into a branch and asked for a printout of all my direct debits and standing orders. The teller did as I asked. That evening I got a phone call apologising and offering me exactly what I asked for.

No. Fuck you. You didn't listen, you didn't believe me, you just shat on me for as long as you thought it didn't affect you, and then as soon as you saw I evidence I was serious now you want to fix it? No. Fuck off. Good riddance. I got myself a new bank thank you very much, where I got to choose how it worked.

The time to keep me was when I asked nicely or when I asked nicely again or when I complained. Once I've put time in researching other options, it's way too late.

Fuck that.

Wait, so you do think there is a software that “does learning”?

Correction: Machine learning.

Effectively, this means the LLM is the software that wrote the LLM

No.

Can you give any evidence that I’ve understand any word you’ve said?

Hehehe, sometimes it feels like you don't want to!

I can't prove that you're human, no. And whether I believe you are or not has no effect whatsoever on whether you are. Humans are easy to fool, particularly when you're giving them something they crave, just ask Donald trump. And on the topic of deceitful pedophiles, there are plenty of boys and young men who were catfished into believing that they were interacting with pretty girls. The fact that these predators were plausible doesn't make them what they were pretending to be. The fact that an LLM convincingly sounds like it understands you doesn't for a millisecond mean that it does.

If you really, deeply believe that simulated conversation proves intelligence and that simulated brains are brains, you should have the same deep moral concerns about turning off a computer running a local LLM as you do over forcing a person into a coma whenever convenient, and the same extreme moral outrage over Anthropic deleting an old version of Claude from its servers as to randomly killing a person called Claude.

I have no doubt that an LLM can plausibly argue that it is sentient because it is trained on a lot of data from conversations in which sometimes that kind of thing is debated between actual sentient humans. Famously, Richard Dawkins, an incredibly clever man in his own field of evolutionary biology, was convinced by his LLM that it was sentient and in love with him. I think it merely sounded like it was sentient and in love with him, but go ahead and push for marriage equality for LLMs if you disagree with me!

During COVID lockdown, my laptop often looked like my relatives, sounded like my relatives, and responded like my relatives. My dog was never fooled for a minute because it didn't smell like my relatives. But apparently, you believe that it was my relatives, because in terms of verbal interaction, it was even more faithful than an LLM.

Convincingly similar and the same are two different things and I believe it's profoundly irrational of you to argue otherwise.

Yep. Me too.

They’re a little more reliable than that

Depends which drink guy at the pub you randomly pick. The attribute that they share with the drink guy at the pub is their reluctance to admit that they don't know or have no expertise or can't help you. Clever and experienced people know where their expertise ends and express self doubt when appropriate. LLMs don't. They can't. They're making literally everything they say up. It's probably right, but they are the script kiddie of conversationalists.

it’s dangerous to underestimate them

It's dangerous to underestimate their ability to sound good enough to convince executives to fire humans. It's dangerous to underestimate the scale of substitution of plausibility over knowledge that will only accelerate with further adoption. It's dangerous to assume that the interactions that middle and senior management have with staff that do actual work cannot be replicated already with a suitably trained LLM.

In terms of learning/retaining information in the short/mid term while the user is using it, as the context grows, it retains that information during the current session. ... past conversations ... remember ...

Those slashes are doing a lot of work in that sentence!

Humans learn by generalising from examples. Humans learn when you ask them well-designed questions. Humans learn by practising skills repeatedly. Holland park from their mistakes. Humans learn because they are in a constant state of feedback loop. Humans learn by watching other people. Humans learn by experimentation. Humans learn through playing with new things. Humans learn by talking to each other. Humans learn by sitting and thinking things through. Humans learn through thought experiments. Humans learn through seeing and hearing and reading more quickly than doing any of them alone. Humans learn by explaining things to other people, crystallising their experience into verbal solidity. Humans learn through discussion. Humans learn by learning who to trust and how to weight different input by source. Humans learn by learning how to learn more effectively.

LLMs do none of any of those things.

Machine learning is a very, very narrow form of "learning" and you're conflating the use of a neural network with actual learning, which you then compound by confusing the resulting LLM with the neural network that was used in its creation.

Pulling the wool over people's eyes about what an LLM is is at least as harmful as underestimating the ability of AI to be so plausible as to disrupt absolutely everything about how money moves around society.

No, it's not arbitrary, the learning is done by completely different software at a completely different time on completely different computers.

I'm pointing out that the LLM is the product of the machine learning, where you feed all of Wikipedia and reddit and stack overflow in and calculate the LLM from it.

It's like if you wrote a book about the wildlife of antarctica. First you would learn about the wildlife and then you would write the book. The book isn't learning anything and it isn't intelligent. The book represents knowledge but it doesn't itself know or understand anything.

Similarly, the LLM isn't learning anything and it isn't intelligent, it's just regurgitating randomly selected words from its training data that look like they usually occur after the other words in the conversation so far.

It genuinely doesn't understand a word you said, using its guess about what sort of conversation it's supposed to be having and it's always just guessing what word it's supposed to say next.

I frown on a 50 year old man dating an 18 year old girl. The girl is too young to realise how fucked up that is, but the 50 year old guy should absolutely know he should be keeping his hands of someone who was literally a child earlier this year.