My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
@DrewKadel
That is very brilliant, with one caveat. It's not people wishing it to give actua answers, it's marketed and sold as something that dies just that.
"May occasionally generate incorrect content" is a hoax: LLMs by design are incapable of associating a likelihood value to their output.
Their output is totally randomly, and totally by design, true or false, without any specific interest in either. LLMs are bullshit[1] engines
[1]: Frankfurt, H. On bullshit, 2005
@dataKnightmare @DrewKadel > LLMs by design are incapable of associating a likelihood value to their output.
> Their output is totally randomly
Sorry, but this is just false. The probability space of "totally random" output is unimaginably huge and most of it not just false, but complete gibberish. Throw a 26-sided dice a few times and compare that totally random result to the GPT output.
To navigate it *at all* requires calculating likelihood and picking only up the sensible stuff.
So "associating a likelihood value to their output" is exactly like the thing works.
