economics reporter learns "surprising facts" from no data - eviltoast

starting out[0] with “I was surprised by the following results” and it just goes further down almost-but-not-quite Getting It Avenue

close, but certainly no cigar

choice quotes:

Why is it impressive that a model trained on internet text full of random facts happens to have a lot of random facts memorized? … why does that in any way indicate intelligence or creativity?

That’s a good point.

you don’t fucking say

I have a website (TrackingAI.org) that already administers a political survey to AIs every day. So I could easily give the AIs a real intelligence test, and track that over time, too.

really, how?

As I started manually giving AIs IQ tests

oh.

Then it proceeds to mis-identify every single one of the 6 answer options, leading it to pick the wrong answer. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to its misidentifications

if this fuckwit had even the slightest fucking understanding of how these things work, it would be glaringly obvious

there’s plenty more, so remember to practice stretching before you start your eyerolls

  • self@awful.systems
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    10 months ago

    this coin I’m flipping fundamentally knows everything about how the Irish drive, but it only seems to feel like giving me the right answer approximately half the time

    this reminds me of very early in my programming career, when I discovered that an NPC I programmed to randomly either move forward or turn left every 10 seconds was surprisingly good at solving simple labyrinths. I used to instantiate like 100 of them and see which ones would win (or “fight” by colliding with each other, or escape the labyrinth by stacking on top of other instances). you’re telling me now I was a handful of incredibly stupid blog posts away from being a renowned AI researcher?

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      10 months ago

      I used to instantiate like 100 of them and see which ones would win (or “fight” by colliding with each other

      The basilisk will not take kindly to your desecration of AGI for sport.