577
Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
They're right
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.
Bot even that smart. There a study recently that simple questiona like "what was huckleberry finn first published" had a 60% error rate.
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AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.
Is stringing words together really considered knowledge?
If they're strung together correctly then yeah.
Does it have agency?
Then yss
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LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.
It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.
"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
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What a very unfortunate name for a university.
I'm surprised it's not way more than half. Almost every subjective thing I read about LLMs oversimplifies how they work and hugely overstates their capabilities.
No one has asked so I am going to ask:
What is Elon University and why should I trust them?
Ironic coincidence of the name aside, it appears to be a legit bricks and mortar university in a town called Elon, North Carolina.
I know enough people for whom that's true.