Technology

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.

Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.

Am American.

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

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

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

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

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

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.

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 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.

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

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.

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

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.

Aside from the unfortunate name of the university, I think that part of why LLMs may be perceived as smart or 'smarter' is because they are very articulate and, unless prompted otherwise, use proper spelling and grammar, and tend to structure their sentences logically.

Which 'smart' humans may not do, out of haste or contextual adaptation.

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

They're right

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.

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.

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

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.

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.