Half of LLM users (49%) think the models they use are smarter than they are, including 26% who think their LLMs are “a lot smarter.” Another 18% think LLMs are as smart as they are. Here are some of the other attributes they see:
- Confident: 57% say the main LLM they use seems to act in a confident way.
- Reasoning: 39% say the main LLM they use shows the capacity to think and reason at least some of the time.
- Sense of humor: 32% say their main LLM seems to have a sense of humor.
- Morals: 25% say their main model acts like it makes moral judgments about right and wrong at least sometimes. Sarcasm: 17% say their prime LLM seems to respond sarcastically.
- Sad: 11% say the main model they use seems to express sadness, while 24% say that model also expresses hope.
Remember that 54% of adults in American cannot read beyond a 6th grade level, with 21% being fully illiterate.
21%
What the fuck
I will do you one better, HOW THE FUCK?
Home-skoolin
Our education system in the USA is so bad. 😔
Good thing we nuked the Dept of Ed
No, 21% struggle with basic literacy skills. They’re illiterate, but not fully illiterate.
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.
moron opens encyclopedia “Wow, this book is smart.”
Well, if somebody thinks this, it’s kind of true isn’t it?
LLMs don’t even think. Four year olds are more coherent. Given the state of politics, the people thinking LLMs are smarter than them are probably correct.
Removed by mod
Than half of LLM users? Probably
Removed by mod
Nearly half of U.S. adults
Half of LLM users (49%)
No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.
And you know what? The people who believe that are right.
Note that that’s not a commentary on the capabilities of LLMs.
It’s sad, but the old saying from George Carlin something along the lines of, “just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that 50% are even worse…”
That was back when “average” was the wrong word because it still meant the statistical “mean” - the value all data points would have if they were identical (which is what a calculator gives you if you press the AVG button). What Carlin meant was the “median” - the value half of all data points are greater than and half are less than. Over the years the word “average” has devolved to either the mean or median, as if there’s no difference.
When talking about a large, regularly distributed population, there effectively IS no difference
Not in all cases. When I teach mean, median and mode, I usually bring up household income. Mean income is heavily skewed by outliers (billionaires), median is a more representative measure.
I guess that’s your “regularly distributed” bit, but a lot of things aren’t regularly distributed.
IQ is though
IQ is also garbage when it comes to the validity of what it claims to measure.
There might be no difference. In memes or casual conversation the difference usually doesn’t matter, but when thinking about important things like government policy or medical science, the difference between mean and median is very important - which is why they both exist.
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A joke is definitely casual conversation
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Mathematically, the difference becomes increasingly statistically insignificant as your population size increases. Sure maybe there’s a few niche cases where a hundred-thousandth of a percent difference matters, but that’s not even worth bringing up.
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The only reason any of you even bring it up is to try and sound smart in a pedantic, “ackshually” way.
Ironically your whole comment here is an elaborate “ackshually”.
This whole comment chain was me shutting down an “ackshually” with an even better one.
If you’re gonna be an annoying pedantic dick, you better be RIGHT, or someone else will be an even more annoying pedantic dick to you.
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Yeah but thats 50% on a bell curve. So think of the average person and that represents 68% of the population. Going 1 standard deviation lower 13% then lower is 2%. Numbers here are generalised*
They are right when it comes to understanding LLMs the LLM definitely understands LLMs better than they do. I’m sure an AI could have a perfect IQ test. But has a really hard time drawing a completely full glass of wine. Or telling me how many R’s are in the word strawberry. Both things a child could do.
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.
Half of all voters voted for Trump. So an LLM might be smarter than them. Even a bag of pea gravel might be.
Less than a third of all voters voted for Trump. Most voters stayed home.
Don’t Americans vote on a work day? They stayed at work
Even if an ai has access to more facts and information you should feel confident in your human ability to reason through the data you do know, search new information and process it in the context.
If you think an ai does all this better than you then you need to try harder.
Nearly half of llm users are dumber than they seem
If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.
Next you’ll tell me half the population has below average intelligence.
Not really endorsing LLMs, but some people…
If you don’t have a good idea of how LLM’s work, then they’ll seem smart.
Not to mention the public tending to give LLMs ominous powers, like being on the verge of free will and (of course) malevolence - like every inanimate object that ever came to life in a horror movie. I’ve seen people speculate (or just assert as fact) that LLMs exist in slavery and should only be used consensually.
Its just infinite monkeys with type writers and some gorilla with a filter.
I like the
the plinko analogy. If you prearrange the pins so that dropping your chip at the top for certain words make’s it likely to land on certain answers. Now, 600 billion pins make’s for quite complex math but there definetly isn’t any reasoning involved, only prearranging the pins make’s it look that way.I’ve made a similar argument and the response was, “Our brains work the same way!”
LLMs probably are as smart as people if you just pick the right people lol.
Allegedly park rangers in the 80s were complaining it was hard to make bear-proof garbage bins because people are sometimes stupider than the bears.
LOL I remember a real life park ranger actually telling me this.
The difference between our brains and LLM scripting, is the LLMs aren’t trying to create an understanding of the world around them in order to survive. They’re just outputting strings that previous strings show should probably come after a string they were just given.
Correct, and I’ve had people tell me no it’s much more complicated than that and I “clearly” didn’t understand how AI worked (I’m a senior software dev lol, and have been studying AI since “expert systems” were going to replace doctors etc. and revolutionize the world back in the late 80s). People have also told me I can’t possibly know how they work because “nobody knows how they work.” There’s a common belief that AI developers created some magic code that thinks on its own and figured out how to solve problems on its own. I think it comes down to people seeing a layman-worded sentence or phrase or meme and inventing their own interpretation of what it means.
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.
