| ▲ | Bag of words, have mercy on us(experimental-history.com) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 20 points by ntnbr 3 hours ago | 13 comments | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | viccis an hour ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Every day I see people treat gen AI like a thinking human, Dijkstra's attitudes about anthropomorphizing computers is vindicated even more. That said, I think the author's use of "bag of words" here is a mistake. Not only does it have a real meaning in a similar area as LLMs, but I don't think the metaphor explains anything. Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is trained to replicate the semiotic appearance of doing so. A "bag of words" doesn't sufficiently explain this behavior. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Ukv 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm not convinced that "It's just a bag of words" would do much to sway someone who is overestimating an LLM's abilities. Feels too abstract/disconnected from what their experience using the LLM will be that it'll just sound obviously mistaken. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | palata 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Slightly unfortunate that "Bag of words" is already a different concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_of_words. My second thought is that it's not the metaphor that is misleading. People have been told thousands of times that LLMs don't "think", don't "know", don't "feel", but are "just a very impressive autocomplete". If they still really want to completely ignore that, why would they suddenly change their mind with a new metaphor? Humans are lazy. If it looks true enough and it cost less effort, humans will love it. "Are you sure the LLM did your job correctly?" is completely irrelevant: people couldn't care less if it's correct or not. As long as the employer believes that the employee is "doing their job", that's good enough. So the question is really: "do you think you'll get fired if you use this?". If the answer is "no, actually I may even look more productive to my employer", then why would people not use it? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | darepublic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Nice essay but when I read this > But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | Herring 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Give it time. The first iPhone sucked compared to the Nokia/Blackberry flagships of the day. No 3G support, couldn't copy/paste, no apps, no GPS, crappy camera, quick price drops, negligible sales in the overall market. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | Kim_Bruning an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is essentially Lady Lovelace's objection from the 19th century [1]. Turing addressed this directly in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) [2], and implicitly via the halting problem in "On Computable Numbers" (1936) [3]. Later work on cellular automata, famously Conway's Game of Life [4], demonstrates more conclusively that this framing fails as a predictive model: simple rules produce structures no one "put in." A test I did myself was to ask Claude (The LLM from Anthropic) to write working code for entirely novel instruction set architectures (e.g., custom ISAs from the game Turing Complete [5]), which is difficult to reconcile with pure retrieval. [1] Lovelace, A. (1843). Notes by the Translator, in Scientific Memoirs Vol. 3. ("The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.") Primary source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Scientific_Memoirs/3/Sketch_o.... See also: https://www.historyofdatascience.com/ada-lovelace/ and https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... [2] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 [3] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf [4] https://web.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Library/life.pdf [5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||