Technology

It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.

"Half of LLM users " beleive this. Which is not to say that people who understand how flawed LLMs are, or what their actual function is, do not use LLMs and therefore arent i cluded in this statistic?
This is kinda like saying '60% of people who pay for their daily horoscope beleive it is an accurate prediction'.

You say this like this is wrong.

Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.

LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent

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 supposed 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.

They're right

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

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.

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

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