this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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I suspect that most people think (maybe not even consciously) that these models answer questions by retrieving data and then writing a response which incorporates that data, rather than just generating text that may or may not contain actual facts.
It really bears repeating over and over that all these so-called AI systems do is take a prompt and output text in response to it that reads as if a human wrote it.
Yeah. They may learn other stuff in the process, but at the end of the day all they are doing is predicting the next word/token.
They definitely retrieve data too, otherwise you wouldn't be able to send ask them about news events that happened yesterday and get a summary on it.
You can also get a summary on news events that didn't happen.
I guess that's on you if you're asking it something like "tell me yesterday's news". No matter your feelings on AI our current LLMs are indisputably a great tool for sending emails and summarizing large text as a draft. If you're taking the output and running with it and not relying on any other external sources or proofreading then I could see how someone could come to the conclusion it's 100% terrible awful.
You can tell these things about API calls and they can make API calls.
I have my own GPT4 instance instructed to gather information as necessary so it asks me questions when it needs to.
You can get it to “ask questions” with specific syntax which can then be translated to API calls. This is a way you can get an LLM to consider new information in its tasks.