> This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts.

If the output of the model depends on the intelligence of the person picking outputs out of its training corpus, is the model intelligent?

This is kind of what I don't quite understand when people talk about the models being intelligent. There's a huge blindspot, which is that the prompt entirely determines the output.

▲

TrainedMonkey 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Humans also respond differently when prompted in different ways. For example, politeness often begets politeness. I would expect that to be reflected in training data.

▲

mlsu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If I, a moron, hire a PhD to crack a tough problem for me, I don't need to go back and forth prompting him at a PhD level. I can set him loose on my problem and he'll come back to me with a solution.

	▲	nl 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> hire a PhD to crack a tough problem for me, I don't need to go back and forth prompting him at a PhD level. I can set him loose on my problem and he'll come back to me with a solution. In my experience with many PhDs they are just as prone to getting off track or using their pet techniques as LLMs! And many find it very hard to translate their work into everyday language too...
	▲	Herring 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well if it ever gets to be a full replacement for phds, you’ll know cause it will have already replaced you.

▲

HPsquared 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that's what is happening. It's simulating a conversation, after all. A bit like code switching.

▲

zozbot234 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What is a "sophisticated prompt"? What if I just tack on "please think about this a lot and respond in a highly sophisticated manner" to my question/prompt? Anyone can do this once they're made aware of this potential issue. Sometimes the UX layer even adds this for you in the system prompt, you just have to tick the checkbox for "I want a long, highly sophisticated answer".

▲

nl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

In general it will match the language style you use.

If you ask a sophisticated question (lots of clauses, college reading level or above) it will respond in kind.

You are basically moving where the generation happens in the latent space. By asking in a sophisticated way you are moving the latent space away from say children's books and towards say PhD dissertations.

▲

mlsu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They have a chart that shows it. The education level of the input determines the education level of the output.

These things are supposed to have intelligence on tap. I'll imagine this in a very simple way. Let's say "intellignce" is like a fluid. It's a finite thing. Intelligence is very valuable, it's the substrate for real-world problem solving that makes these things ostensibly worth trillions of dollars. Intelligence comes from interaction with the world; someone's education and experience. You spend some effort and energy feeding someone, clothing them, sending them to college. And then you get something out, which is intelligence that can create value for society.

When you are having a conversation with the AI, is the intelligence flowing out of the AI? Or is it flowing out of the human operator?

The answer to this question is extremely important. If the AI can be intelligent "on its own" without a human operator, then it will be very valuable -- feed electricity into a datacenter and out comes business value. But if a model is only intelligent as someone using it, well, the utility seems to be very harshly capped. At best it saves a bit of time, but it will never do anything novel, it will never create value on its own, independently, it will never scale beyond a 1:1 "human picking outputs".

If you must encode intelligence into the prompt to get intelligence out of the model, well, this doesn't quite look like AGI does it?

▲

mlsu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

ofc what I'm getting at is, you can't get something from nothing. There is no free lunch.

You spend energy distilling the intelligence of the entire internet into a set of weights, but you still had to expend the energy to have humans create the internet first. And on top of this, in order to pick out what you want from the corpus, you have to put some energy in: first, the energy of inference, but second and far more importantly, the energy of prompting. The model is valuable because the dataset is valuable; the model output is valuable because the prompt is valuable.

So wait then, where does this exponential increase in value come from again?

	▲	felixgallo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		the same place an increase in power comes from when you use a lever.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

thousand_nights 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i don't know, are we intelligent?

you could argue that our input (senses) entirely define the output (thoughts, muscle movements, etc)

	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	HPsquared 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's a bit of baked-in stuff as well. We are a full culture-mind-body[-spirit] system.

▲

wat10000 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A smart person will tailor their answers to the perceived level of knowledge of the person asking, and the sophistication of the question is a big indicator of this.

▲

sjajshha 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]