• bearforcepilot@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.

        • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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          2 days ago

          That’s like saying you can have space exploration without ballistic missiles. Once the technology is there power and/or the market will do whatever it wants with it.

          • bumblebeer@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Except even moreso with language models. Here it is not just a similar technology, but the exact same vehicle.

            Translation: The way scaling laws and gradient descent work for language models means that there is NO functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.

            • SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              And a space ship can be used as a ballistic missile directly itself dude… There’s no difference, you’re arguing nothing.

              Your research model can do anything an llm can and there’s nothing stopping someone. So how’s it different?

              • bumblebeer@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                I honestly don’t know what point you are trying to make, but since you are clearly confused by my comment, let me try to further explain.

                My claim: The observation that you can’t have space exploration without ballistic missiles is correct. This analogy as applied to AI (specifically LLMs) is also correct, but falls short of perfect parity.

                The gap — which is what I tried to address in my previous comment — is that for the aerospace example, space exploration vehicles are like ballistic missiles, but for LLMs those trained to do medical research or those trained to be a chat bot are often not just similar, but the exact same.

                That was the point. An LLM built for research vs one built for chat are not just similar, like an ICBM vs a manned space vehicle, but are literally exactly the same object with no difference whatsoever.

                This was my attempt to support the person I responded to against the critically uninformed, “Why don’t we just have the one (medical research AI) without the other (chat bot)?” crowd. With the obvious answer being, “Because they are the same thing.”

                Q: So how’s it different? A: It’s not. That was my point.