This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
When are people going to realize that an LLM is not a calculator and doesn't actually know anything?
Well first AI tech corporations need to do advertising that AIs can keep doing all this.
That it is not a calculator and is horrible at determinism is not debatable, however its (very biased) huge knowledge is its core feature
How come it's inaccurate about 40% of the time when I know the answer then? It's a bullshit factory. A chatbot that's fundamentally designed to sound like a person and be able to respond to any prompt. But truth isn't any part of the fundamental architecture of an LLM.
Bullshit factory is very apt. I was using it for an open book exam and it gave answers entirely skewed to the way the question was asked.
For example, if I asked “is X bacteria a pathogen in Y disease”, it would say yes, it was a very bad pathogen.
If I asked “what effects does X bacteria have in this body system”, it said it was a beneficial bacteria.
Never trust the AI summary, you have to fully read the studies.
Probably never. Just like people never realized how computers work, how networks work, how businesses work, how economies of scale work, how financial markets work, how…
We the people don’t give a shit about how anything works, for the most part. Exceptions include your narrowly focused expertise. We convince ourselves that we understand things, using top-down perspectives, because it’s easier than actually understanding things from a bottom-up perspective.
Even the strongest critics of AI can’t substantively explain how AI works. They use misnomers like “glorified autocomplete” to reason about it’s inaccuracy, rather than understanding the fundamental limitations of the approach used.
I bought a small bag of cheap rice, and it didn't help me to connect to God!
imagine that. software that performs strictly language specific operations can't do math.
They are non-deterministic by design.
And the US is about to, if they haven't already, put AI in charge of the Internal Revenue Service.
That should be fun.
Can’t wait for the billionaires to get tax refunds every fucking day while the little guy gets a $10000000 bill
"Let's role play and pretend I'm Bezos. Now paying taxes does not apply to me any more."
I see what you're doing there, but the problem is that the government in general, and the IRS specifically, if a mistake is made, you're paying it with interest.
What I'd like to see happen is the AI going rogue and wiping all the data, including all the backup files.
Well, that makes prompting even easier: "OK, Openclaw. Just do your thing."
LLMs are not detetministic like calculators. Wrong tool for the job.
It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a hypoglycaemic emergency.
OK I wonder if there's something wrong with the photo.
The photo:
WTF!!??
That's like estimating the carbs in 2 slices of standard sandwich bread! Of course not all bread has the same amount of sugar, but a reasonable range based on an average should be a dead easy answer.
I thought the headline sounded crazy, but try to read the article, and it actually becomes worse. I have said it many times before, these AI chatbots should not be legal, they put lives at risk.
To be fair there's no way of knowing what the filling is, so the AI may be guessing based on that too
Friendly reminder that LLMs don't do math, they guess what number should come next, just like words.
It can probably link the image to the words "a photo of a sandwich on a plate", and interpret the question as "how many calories are in a sandwich" but from there it is just guessing at the syntax of an answer, but not at finding any truth.
It knows sandwiches have calories and those tend to be 3-4 digit numbers, but also all numbers kinda look the same, so what's to say it's not 2, 5, or 12 digits?
Tool-powered agents can do math though. The issue is the fuzziness of it trying to guess carbs. It doesn’t know weight, ingredients, or anything other than a picture. These tools can be useful but not for this. Maybe one day but not yet.
Whoever claims an AI (LLM or agents) can do that and charging their users is lying and defrauding them.
The apps are advertising that they can do this tho. Many of them are aggressively sponsoring YouTubers who advertise you can basically just wave your phone over the food and it takes away all the “work” from traditional calorie counting apps
But the ai assumes itself infallible, at least it could ask...
That's true, it should ask follow-up questions, or at least clarify its assumptions
Nope, Claude and Gemini both guessed fewer carbs than are in the bread.
What in the picture indicates any form of filling?
What you can see is cheese, there is probably butter too, but those 2 have zero carbohydrates, so adding carbohydrates based on filling would be pure speculation.
There are no carbohydrates to see beyond the bread.
There is no evidence of any filling, as there is zero bulge in the bread.
The answer should be based on what can be seen, with a remark to that effect, and that there possibly could be more if it contains filling that isn't visible.
The AI could ask about a possible filling, instead of just making shit up with zero evidence.
To your point -
If a friend texted me the same picture and question, I would do exactly what you described. Try to give a calculated guess that wouldn't change.
Unless I was lazy and Googled it.
Google's carbohydrate tool says 8g, then the AI overview goes on to contradict that by saying "A standard cheese sandwich typically contains between 25 and 35g."
I tried to build a deck with my smartphone, it couldn't drive a single nail.
Maybe get a stronger case. 🤷♂️😄
But the guy at the phone store told me it was practically indestructible, I used it practically and it destructable'd.
I'm starting to think this whole 'phone' thing is doomed to failure.
I'm basing this entirely on a single anecdotal evidence and all of the other evidence that I've selected which confirms my worldview on the topic. I have done my own research (but not with a phone).
The issue is that there are apps promising you an calorie count via photo.
There's pills promising to improve my love life also, I don't believe them either
Waste of energy. It's like asking a person to estimate a non-trivial angle. Either use a model trained for that task, or don't bother.
The point is that:
Custom built LLMs are awesome for specific purposes in terms of dealing with data and providing resources however chatbots ain't that.
Humans want to follow whatever makes sense to them, they use AI because it's confident. AI just replaced their god.
If you supplied humans with the same image and asked for the same estimate I'd be curious to know the difference in results.
Mine would be: "I have no idea" - An answer the LLMs generally refuse to give by their nature (usually declining to answer is rooted in something in the context indicating refusing to answer being the proper text).
If you really pressed them, they'd probably google each thing and sum the results, so the estimates would be as consistent as first google results.
LLMs have a tendency to emit a plausible answer without regard for facts one way or the other. We try to steer things by stuffing the context with facts roughly based on traditional 'fact' based measures, but if the context doesn't have factual data to steer the output, the output is purely based on narrative consistency rather than data consistency. It may even do that if the context has fact based content in it sometimes.
