TechTakes

To date, the largest working nuclear reactor constructed entirely of cheese is the 160 MWe Unit 1 reactor of the French nuclear plant École nationale de technologie supérieure (ENTS).

"That's it! Gromit, we'll make the reactor out of cheese!"

A bunch of scientific papers are probably better data than a bunch of Reddit posts and it's still not good enough.

Consider the task we're asking the AI to do. If you want a human to be able to correctly answer questions across a wide array of scientific fields you can't just hand them all the science papers and expect them to be able to understand it. Even if we restrict it to a single narrow field of research we expect that person to have a insane levels of education. We're talking 12 years of primary education, 4 years as an undergraduate and 4 more years doing their PhD, and that's at the low end. During all that time the human is constantly ingesting data through their senses and they're getting constant training in the form of feedback.

All the scientific papers in the world don't even come close to an education like that, when it comes to data quality.

Oh boy, that was hilarious!

Haha. Not specifically.

It's more a comment on how hard it is to separate truth from fiction. Adding glue to pizza is obviously dumb to any normal human. Sometimes the obviously dumb answer is actually the correct one though. Semmelweis's contemporaries lambasted him for his stupid and obviously nonsensical claims about doctors contaminating pregnant women with "cadaveric particles" after performing autopsies.

Those were experts in the field and they were unable to guess the correctness of the claim. Why would we expect normal people or AIs to do better?

There may be a time when we can reasonably have such an expectation. I don't think it will happen before we can give AIs training that's as good as, or better, than what we give the most educated humans. Reading all of Reddit, doesn't even come close to that.

It can’t be that hard

woo boy

i can't tell if this is a joke suggestion, so i will very briefly treat it as a serious one:

getting the machine to do critical thinking will require it to be able to think first. you can't squeeze orange juice from a rock. putting word prediction engines side by side, on top of each other, or ass-to-mouth in some sort of token centipede, isn't going to magically emerge the ability to determine which statements are reasonable and/or true

and if i get five contradictory answers from five LLMs on how to cure my COVID, and i decide to ignore the one telling me to inject bleach into my lungs, that's me using my regular old intelligence to filter bad information, the same way i do when i research questions on the internet the old-fashioned way. the machine didn't get smarter, i just have more bullshit to mentally toss out

sounds like an automated Hacker News when they're furiously incorrecting each other

It can’t be that hard to make a chatbot that can take instructions like “identify any unsafe outcomes from following this advice”

It certainly seems like it should be easy to do. Try an example. How would you go about defining safe vs unsafe outcomes for knife handling? Since we can't guess what the user will ask about ahead of time, the definition needs to apply in all situations that involve knives; eating, cooking, wood carving, box cutting, self defense, surgery, juggling, and any number of activities that I may not have though about yet.

Since we don't know who will ask about it we also need to be correct for every type of user. The instructions should be safe for toddlers, adults, the elderly, knife experts, people who have never held a knife before. We also need to consider every type of knife. Folding knives, serrated knives, sharp knives, dull knives, long, short, etc.

When we try those sort of safety rules with humans (eg many venues have a sign that instructs people to "be kind" or "don't be stupid") they mostly work until we inevitably run into the people who argue about what that means.