Submitted 3 weeks ago by HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth to technology@lemmy.world
https://media.kbin.earth/c5/38/c538e178af17fa0c334cad0916ef9eb70c2e1829354eef4f2ce05bd53aa1f4be.jpg
This is the technology worth trillions of dollars huh
The letters that make up words is a common blind spot for AIs, since they are trained on strings of tokens (roughly words) they don’t have a good concept of which letters are inside those words or what order they are in.
I find it bizarre that people find these obvious cases to prove the tech is worthless. Like saying cars are worthless because they can’t go under water.
Not bizarre at all.
The point isn’t “they can’t do word games therefore they’re useless”, it’s “if this thing is so easily tripped up on the most trivial shit that a 6-year-old can figure out, don’t be going round claiming it has PhD level expertise”.
Then why is Google using it for question like that?
Surely it should be advanced enough to realise it’s weakness with this kind of questions and just don’t give an answer.
Well it also can’t code very well either
Understanding the bounds of tech makes it easier for people to gage its utility. The only people who desire ignorance are those that profit from it.
I find it bizarre that people find these obvious cases to prove the tech is worthless. Like saying cars are worthless because they can’t go under water.
This reaction is because conmen are claiming that current generations of LLM technology is going to remove our need for experts and scientists.
We’re not demanding submersible cars, we’re just laughing about the people paying top dollar for the lastest electric car while plannig an ocean cruise.
I’m confident that there’s going to be a great deal of broken… everything…built with AI “assistance” during the next decade.
Well technically cars can go underwater. They just cannot get out because they stop working.
It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.
Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.
✅ Colorado
✅ Connedicut
✅ Delaware
❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)
✅ Florida
But not
❌ I’aho
❌ Iniana
❌ Marylan
❌ Nevaa
❌ North Akota
❌ Rhoe Islan
❌ South Akota
Gosh tier comment.
You just described most of my post history.
Everyone knows it’s properly spelled “I, the ho” not Idaho. That’s why it didn’t make the list.
You joke, but I bet you didn’t know that Connecticut contained a “d”
I wonder what other words contain letters we don’t know about.
The famous ‘invisible D’ of Connecticut, my favorite SCP.
That actually sounds like a fun SCP - a word that doesn’t seem to contain a letter, but when testing for the presence of that letter using an algorithm that exclusively checks for that presence, it reports the letter is indeed present. Any attempt to check where in the word the letter is, or to get a list of all letters in that word, spuriously fail. Containment could be fun, probably involving amnestics and widespread societal influence, I also wonder if they could create an algorithm for checking letter presence that can be performed by hand without leaking any other information to the person performing it, reproducing the anomaly without computers.
ct -> d is a not-uncommon OCR fuck up. Maybe that’s the source of it’s garbage data?
SCP-00WTFDoC (lovingly called “where’s the fucking D of Connecticut” by the foundation workers, also “what the fuck, doc?”)
People think it’s safe, because it’s “just an invisible D”, not even a dick, just the letter D, and it only manifests verbally when someone tries to say “connecticut” or write it down. When you least expect it, everyone heard “Donnedtidut”, everyone read that thing and a portal to that fucking place opens and drags you in.
Words are full of mystery! Besides the invisible D, Connecticut has that inaudible C…
Every American I know does pronounce it like Connedicut 🤔
Really? Everyone I know calls it kinetic-cut. But I group up in new england.
The d in Connecticut is between the e and the i. They don’t connect because it was cut.
Connecticut is Jewish?
Connedicut
I was going to make a joke if you’re from connedicut you never pronounce first d in the word. Conne-icut
No, this is Google throwing the cheapest possible shit at you that is barely capable of stringing together 5 coherent sentences but has the reasoning capability of a tapeworm.
Here is the output of the output of the minimalist open Chinese model Qwen3, that runs locally on my 6 year old mid-end PC:
The US states that contain the letter "d" (case-insensitive, as state names are typically capitalized) are as follows. I've verified each state name for the presence of the letter "d" in its standard spelling: Colorado (contains "d" in "Colorado") Delaware (starts with "D") Florida (contains "d" in "Florida") Idaho (contains "d" in "Idaho") Indiana (contains "d" in "Indiana") Maryland (ends with "d" in "Maryland") Nevada (contains "d" in "Nevada") North Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota") Rhode Island (contains "d" in "Rhode") South Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota") Total: 10 states.
Illinois contains a hidden D which is in your mom.
I didn’t understand your comment, so I asked the same LLM as before.
It explained it and I think that I get it now. Low-grade middle-school-“Your Mom”-joke, is it? Ha-ha… 🙄
This also means that AI did better than myself at both tasks I’ve given it today (I found only 9 states with “d” when going over the state-list myself…).
Whatever. I’m gonna have second lunch now.
Exactly.
The model that responds to your search query is designed to be cheap, not accurate. It has to generate an answer to every single search issued to Google. They’re not using high parameter models with reasoning because those would be ruinously expensive.
They took money from cancer reaearch programs to fund this.
After we pump another hundred trillion dollars and half the electricity generated globally into AI you’re going to feel pretty foolish for this comment.
Just a couple billion more parameters, bro, I swear, it will replace all the workers
only cancer patients benefit from cancer research, CEOs benefit from AI
Tbf cancer patients benefit from AI too tho a completely different type that’s not really related to LLM chatbot AI girlfriend technology used in these.
Well as long as we still have enough money to buy weapons for that one particular filthy country in the middle east, we’re fine.
Well, for anyone who knows a bit about how LLMs work, it’s pretty obvious why LLMs struggle with identifying the letters in the words
Well go on…
They don’t look at it letter by letter but in tokens, which are automatically generated separately based on occurrence. So while ‘z’ could be it’s own token, ‘ne’ or even ‘the’ could be treated as a single token vector. of course, ‘e’ would still be a separate token when it occurs in isolation. You could even have ‘le’ and ‘let’ as separate tokens, afaik. And each token is just a vector of numbers, like 300 or 1000 numbers that represent that token in a vector space. So ‘de’ and ‘e’ could be completely different and dissimilar vectors.
so ‘delaware’ could look to an llm more like de-la-w-are or similar.
of course you could train it to figure out letter counts based on those tokens with a lot of training data, though that could lower performance on other tasks and counting letters just isn’t that important, i guess, compared to other stuff
Which is State contains 狄? They use a different alphabet, so understanding ours is ridiculous.
it’s actually getting dumber.
Just another trillion, bro.
Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.
Behold the most expensive money burner!
Yesterday i asked Claude Sonnet what was on my calendar (since they just annoyed that feature)
It listed my work meetings on Sunday, so I tried to correct it…
You’re absolutely right - I made an error! September 15th is a Sunday, not a weekend day as I implied. Let me correct that: This Week’s Remaining Schedule: Sunday, September 15
Just today when I asked what’s on my calendar it gave me today and my meetings on the next two thursdays. Not the meetings in between, just thursdays.
Something is off in AI land.
A few weeks ago my Pixel wished me a Happy Birthday when I woke up, and it definitely was not my birthday. Google is definitely letting a shitty LLM write code for it now, but the important thing is they’re bypassing human validation.
Stupid. Just stupid.
pixel? have you heard ~about grapheneOS tho…~
Also, Sunday September 15th is a Monday… I’ve seen so many meeting invites with dates and days that don’t match lately…
Yeah, it said Sunday, I asked if it was sure, then it said I’m right and went back to Sunday.
I assume the training data has the model think it’s a different year or something, but this feature is straight up not working at all for me. I don’t know if they actually tested this at all.
Sonnet seems to have gotten stupider somehow.
Opus isn’t following instructions lately either.
We’ve used the Google AI speakers in the house for years, they make all kinds of hilarious mistakes. They also are pretty convenient and reliable for setting and executing alarms like “7AM weekdays”, and home automation commands like “all lights off”. But otherwise, it’s hit and miss and very frustrating when they push an update that breaks things that used to work.
Wait a sec, Minnasoda doesn't have a d??
That’s how everyone from America seems to say it, besides Jesse Ventura who heavily emphasises the t.
*mini soda
Neither does soda
Where’s Nevada? And Montana?
I just love the d in Montana. Shame it missed it.
Hey look the markov chain showed its biggest weakness (the markov chain)!
In the training data, it could be assumed by output that Connecticut usually follows Colorado in lists of two or more states containing Colorado. There is no other reason for this to occur as far as I know.
Markov Chain based LLMs (I think thats all of them?) are dice-roll systems constrained to probability maps.
Oh l I was thinking it’s because people pronounce it Connedicut
Awe cute!
I was wondering if you’d get similar results for states with the letter R, since there’s lots of prior art mentioning these states as either “D” or “R” during elections.
I don’t think this gets nearly enough visibility: www.academ-ai.info
Papers in peer-reviewed journals with (extremely strong) evidence of AI shenanigans.
Thanks for sharing! I clicked on it with cynicism around how easily we could detect AI usage with confidence vs. risking making false allegations, but every single example on their homepage is super clear and I have no doubts - I’m impressed! (and disappointed)
Yup. I had exactly the same trepidation, and then it was all like “As an AI model, I don’t have access to the data you requested, however here are some examples of…”
You gave a slightly different prompt.
the thing still gave a stupid answer
Gemini is just a depressed and suicidal AI, be nice to it.
I had it completely melt down one day while messing around with its coding shit, I had to console it and tell it it’s doing good, we will solve this, was fucking weird as fuck.
It’ll go in endless circles until it finds out why its wrong,
then it will go right back to them anyway! lol
“AI” hallucinations are not a problem that can be fixed in LLMs. They are an inherent aspect of the process and an inevitable result of the fact that LLMs are mostly probabilistic engines, with no supervisory or introspective capability, which actual sentient beings possess and use to fact-check their output. So there. :p
It’s funny seeing the list and knowing connecticut is only there because it’s alphabetically after colorado (in fact all four listed appear in that order alphabetically) because they probably scraped so many lists of states that the alphabetical order is the statistically most probable response in their corpus when any state name is listed.
inevitable result of the fact that LLMs are mostly probabilistic engines
So we should better put the question like
“What is the probability of a D suddenly appearing in Connecticut?”
Gemini is trained on reddit data, what do you expect?
I get the sentiment behind this post, and it’s almost always funny when LLM are such dumbass. But this is not a good argument against the technology. It is akin to climate change denier using the argument: “look! It snowed today, climate change is so dumb huh ?”
“This is the technology worth trillions of dollars”
You can make anything fly high in the sky with enough helium, just not for long. (Welcome to the present day Tech Stock Market)
Connedicut
We’re turfing out students by the tens on academic misconduct. They are handing in papers with references that clearly state “generated by Chat GPT”. Lazy idiots.
Blows my mind people pay money for wrong answers.
Listen, we just have to boil the ocean five more times.
Then it will hallucinate slightly less.
Or more. There’s no way to be sure since it’s probabilistic.
One of these days AI skeptics will grasp that spelling-based mistakes are an artifact of text tokenization, not some wild stupidity in the model. But today is not that day.
In Copilot terminology, this is a “quick response” instead of the “think deeper” option. The latter actually stops to verify the initial answer before spitting it out.
Hey hey hey hey don’t look at what it actually does.
Look at what it feels like it almost can do and pretend it soon will!
“What did you learn at school today champ?”
“D is for cookie, that’s good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with D”
GitLab Enterprise somewhat recently added support for Amazon Q (based on claude) through an interface they call “GitLab Duo”. I needed to look up something in the GitLab docs, but thought I’d ask Duo/Q instead (the UI has this big button in the top left of every screen to bring up Duo to chat with Q):
(Paraphrasing…)
ME: How do I do X with Amazon Q in GitLab? Q: Open the Amazon Q menu in the GitLab UI and select the appropriate option.
ME: [:looks for the non-existant menu:] ME: Where in the UI do I find this menu?
Q: My last response was incorrect. There is no Amazon Q button in GitLab. In fact, there is no integration between GitLab and Amazon Q at all.
ME: [:facepalm:]
You don’t get it because you aren’t a genius. This chatbot has clearly turned sentient and is trolling you.
Connecdicud.
mrductape@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
Well, it’s almost correct. It’s just one letter off. Maybe if we invest millions more it will be right next time.
Or maybe it is just not accurate and never will be…I will not every fully trust AI. I’m sure there are use cases for it, I just don’t have any.
TheFogan@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Cases where you want something googled quickly to get an answer, and it’s low consequence when the answer is wrong.
IE, say a bar arguement over whether that guy was in that movie. Or you need a customer service agent, but don’t actually care about your customers and don’t want to pay someone.
elvith@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
How it started:
How it’s going:
atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Isnt checking if someone was in a movie really easy to do without AI?
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Just one more private nuclear power plant, bro…
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They’re using oil, gas, and if Trump gets his way, fucking coal.
Unless you count Three Mile Island.