We really need a class, probably in high school, that works through how LLMs work at the high level (don't need to get too far into the deep math, but give people a taste) and then how they're trained, used, and deployed.

I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data." (Unless it's stored in the cloud but encrypted locally with keys only you possess.) Same goes for storing things unencrypted in OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. There is nothing to stop these companies from bulk scanning, data mining, or reporting people based on whatever request a government gives them. Don't count on them to resist, because they often can't, especially if the request is from a sovereign state where they do business.

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nradov 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can make a reasonable case for adding a lot more classes in high school: statistics, nutrition, personal finance, etc. But ultimately it's a zero-sum game and to add a new class means removing an existing class. So what do we cut?

	▲	rootusrootus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My kids' high school covers those topics. And I think that is not a new thing, I specifically remember taking the required personal finance class 35 years ago (great teacher -- crotchety old man who wrote "compound interest" on the blackboard every single day before class and repeatedly proclaimed that if we forgot everything else he taught, please try to remember how compound interest works).

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slashdave 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Um, this is coming from the researchers building these models. So, good luck?

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

>I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There are people with education here that don't fare much better, so I don't know.

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orangecat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions

Assuming you consider it a "delusion" to have a p(doom) of more than 5% or so, that's not uncommon among frontier lab employees who have a pretty good idea of how LLMs work.

	▲	bananaflag 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, I don't see how knowing the details of how LLMs work (which I know btw) would change anything about how intelligent they are. I only need to know that it's a computer program that writes stories, solves math problems and seduces people.