Try reading something like Djikstra’s algorithm on Wikipedia, then ask one to explain it to you. You can ask for a theme, ask it to explain like you’re 5, or provide an example to check if you understood and have it correct any mistakes
It’s fantastic for technical or dry topics, if you know how to phrase things you can get quick lessons tailored to be entertaining and understandable for you personally. And of course, you can ask follow up questions
I am increasingly convinced that the people who claim AIs are useful for any given subject of any import (coding, art, math, teaching, etc.) should immediately be regarded as having absolutely zero knowledge in that subject, even (and especially) if they claim otherwise.
From what I can see in my interactions with LLMs, the only thing they are actually decent at are summarizing blocks of text, and even then if it’s important you should parse the summary carefully to make sure they didn’t miss important details.
I mean… Yeah? Most explanations aren’t great compared to a comprehensive understanding in your head, you already understand it - it would have to be extremely insightful to impress me at that point
The results vary greatly based on the prompt too - not only that, it changes based on the back and forth you’ve already had in the session
It’s not a god, it’s not a human expert, but it’s always available, and it’s interactive.
It doesn’t give you amazing writeups, but (at least for me) it makes things click in minutes that I might need an hour or two to understand through reading up on it. I can get a short summary with key terms, ask about key terms I don’t know, ask for an example in a given context, challenge the example for an explanations of how the example can be generalized, and every once in a while along the way I learn about a blind spot I never realized I had
It’s like talking to a librarian - it gives you the broad strokes of a topic well, which prepares you well enough that you’re ready for deeper reading to fill in the details.
It doesn’t replace a teacher, a tutor, further reading, or anything else - but it’s still a fantastic education tool that can make learning easier and faster
To be honest, I think the world would be a better place if all the money now poured into “AI” would be spent on expanding access to libraries and librarians for everyone.
so the LLM is worthless if you already understand the topic because its explanations are terrible, but if you don’t know the topic the LLM’s explanations are worthless because you don’t know when it’ll be randomly, confidently, and extremely wrong unless you luck into the right incantation
what a revolutionary technology. thank fuck we can endanger the environment and funnel money into the pockets of a bunch of rich technofascists so we can have fancy autocomplete tell us about a basic undergrad CS algorithm in very little detail and with a random chance of being utterly but imperceptibly wrong
I don’t find the explanations bad at all… But it’s extremely useful if you know nothing or not enough about a topic
FWIW, I’m a strong proponent of local AI. The big models are cool and approachable. But a model that runs on my 5 year old budget gaming PC isn’t that much less useful.
We needed the big, expensive AI to get here… But the reason I’m such an advocate is because this technology can do formerly impossible things. It can do so much good or harm - which is why we need as many people as possible to learn how to use it for what it is, not to mindlessly chase the promise of a replacement for workers.
AI is here to stay, and it’ll change everything for better or worse. Companies aren’t going to use it for better, they’re going to chase bigger profits until the world burns. They’re already ruining the web and society, with both AI and enshitification
Individuals skillfully using AI can do more than they can without it - we need every advantage we can get.
It’s not “AI or no AI”, it’s “AI everywhere or only FAANG controlled AI”
yeah, you’re still doing everything you can to dodge the articles we’ve linked and points we’ve made showing that the fucking things just make up plausible bullshit and are therefore worthless for learning, and you’ve taken up more than enough of this thread repeating basic shit we already know. off you fuck
These kinds of things. For a simple example, captioning pictures… Basically impossible, now you can convince a home computer to do it in a weekend. All running locally with a few hundred lines of code
Imagine what that would do for someone using a screen reader
The massive advances in machine learning-based image recognition (which have been fueled, among other things, by global south underpaid labor) have been a wonder for AT users, & predate the current generative AI craze by years.
So, yes - this has been slowly improving for like the last decade, it’s a great example of something impossible becoming possible
Generative AI is polarizing among AT users, with image recognition joining auto-generated audio craptions as a love/hate tool.
Sounds about right… I’ve seen pretty impressive demos on huggingfaces, but most of them are pretty basic.
But it opens the door - so now multimodal models are starting to spread. They turn the image into tokens, so you can use this intermediate output with unstructured language. For example, a meme and a diagram are very different - a meme you’d probably want the text and the description of the meme layout, a chart you’d probably want a description of the axises and highlights.
I use local AI - even the small models can do a lot if you combine and structure them with conventional code. For a lot of reasons. It requires custom code for each thing you want it to do, but it’s a lot more reliable
Here’s what’s magic to me. So instead of just spitting out an answer, you can have a back and forth. First, you might classify it as a chart, then you might ask it to describe the type of chart, ask it to read the axises (or feed in OCR if the models aren’t great readers, and let them interpret it). You can ask to describe/interpret the contents of the graph. You can ask it to note any missing data, or whatever else. Then you can take all of that, and have it summarize it for something more helpful.
Better yet, you can make the AI drive itself. Code the first step of classification, then ask it what relevant details should be included. Then run through the list, feed it back through for a summary, and you get something more useful
That’s why I care so much about AI outreach. Because without learning anything about how neural networks work, a single individual could build something like this. Microsoft/OpenAI, Google and the rest of the tech giants are trying to brute force their way to making an LLM system that replaces workers. I don’t trust them (for hopefully obvious reasons) and I’d cheer if we broke them up, but they’re not all there is to AI
There’s so many building blocks out there free for the taking - you can download models and build things with them, you can just treat them as a black box and
As a species, we don’t understand how to use LLMs. They’re not useless, they’re misused. The only way that will change is if people start using these tools - and it’s much easier than it sounds if a technical person is motivated enough to learn. The initial configuration is painful… From there, it’s just passing in text/images/audio, and there’s exampls and libraries everywhere
Try reading something like Djikstra’s algorithm on Wikipedia, then ask one to explain it to you. You can ask for a theme, ask it to explain like you’re 5, or provide an example to check if you understood and have it correct any mistakes
It’s fantastic for technical or dry topics, if you know how to phrase things you can get quick lessons tailored to be entertaining and understandable for you personally. And of course, you can ask follow up questions
I did! I feel entitled to compensation now!
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I am increasingly convinced that the people who claim AIs are useful for any given subject of any import (coding, art, math, teaching, etc.) should immediately be regarded as having absolutely zero knowledge in that subject, even (and especially) if they claim otherwise.
From what I can see in my interactions with LLMs, the only thing they are actually decent at are summarizing blocks of text, and even then if it’s important you should parse the summary carefully to make sure they didn’t miss important details.
deleted by creator
I mean… Yeah? Most explanations aren’t great compared to a comprehensive understanding in your head, you already understand it - it would have to be extremely insightful to impress me at that point
The results vary greatly based on the prompt too - not only that, it changes based on the back and forth you’ve already had in the session
It’s not a god, it’s not a human expert, but it’s always available, and it’s interactive.
It doesn’t give you amazing writeups, but (at least for me) it makes things click in minutes that I might need an hour or two to understand through reading up on it. I can get a short summary with key terms, ask about key terms I don’t know, ask for an example in a given context, challenge the example for an explanations of how the example can be generalized, and every once in a while along the way I learn about a blind spot I never realized I had
It’s like talking to a librarian - it gives you the broad strokes of a topic well, which prepares you well enough that you’re ready for deeper reading to fill in the details.
It doesn’t replace a teacher, a tutor, further reading, or anything else - but it’s still a fantastic education tool that can make learning easier and faster
To be honest, I think the world would be a better place if all the money now poured into “AI” would be spent on expanding access to libraries and librarians for everyone.
deleted by creator
so the LLM is worthless if you already understand the topic because its explanations are terrible, but if you don’t know the topic the LLM’s explanations are worthless because you don’t know when it’ll be randomly, confidently, and extremely wrong unless you luck into the right incantation
what a revolutionary technology. thank fuck we can endanger the environment and funnel money into the pockets of a bunch of rich technofascists so we can have fancy autocomplete tell us about a basic undergrad CS algorithm in very little detail and with a random chance of being utterly but imperceptibly wrong
I don’t find the explanations bad at all… But it’s extremely useful if you know nothing or not enough about a topic
FWIW, I’m a strong proponent of local AI. The big models are cool and approachable. But a model that runs on my 5 year old budget gaming PC isn’t that much less useful.
We needed the big, expensive AI to get here… But the reason I’m such an advocate is because this technology can do formerly impossible things. It can do so much good or harm - which is why we need as many people as possible to learn how to use it for what it is, not to mindlessly chase the promise of a replacement for workers.
AI is here to stay, and it’ll change everything for better or worse. Companies aren’t going to use it for better, they’re going to chase bigger profits until the world burns. They’re already ruining the web and society, with both AI and enshitification
Individuals skillfully using AI can do more than they can without it - we need every advantage we can get.
It’s not “AI or no AI”, it’s “AI everywhere or only FAANG controlled AI”
yeah, you’re still doing everything you can to dodge the articles we’ve linked and points we’ve made showing that the fucking things just make up plausible bullshit and are therefore worthless for learning, and you’ve taken up more than enough of this thread repeating basic shit we already know. off you fuck
Do you ever learn something on lemmy? I do all the time
Do you trust random Internet strangers at their word? I sure as hell don’t
You can definitely learn even with the risk that the info might be made the fuck up… It’s easy, you don’t trust the LLM.
Do you really not see any value in a tool that can introduce you to endless topics, even if you have to verify it wasn’t made the fuck up?
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that statement being true is quite probable: it was likely impossible before this point to set this much money on fire this pointlessly!
These kinds of things. For a simple example, captioning pictures… Basically impossible, now you can convince a home computer to do it in a weekend. All running locally with a few hundred lines of code
Imagine what that would do for someone using a screen reader
deleted by creator
Ok, great…I guess I picked a good example
So, yes - this has been slowly improving for like the last decade, it’s a great example of something impossible becoming possible
Sounds about right… I’ve seen pretty impressive demos on huggingfaces, but most of them are pretty basic.
But it opens the door - so now multimodal models are starting to spread. They turn the image into tokens, so you can use this intermediate output with unstructured language. For example, a meme and a diagram are very different - a meme you’d probably want the text and the description of the meme layout, a chart you’d probably want a description of the axises and highlights.
I use local AI - even the small models can do a lot if you combine and structure them with conventional code. For a lot of reasons. It requires custom code for each thing you want it to do, but it’s a lot more reliable
Here’s what’s magic to me. So instead of just spitting out an answer, you can have a back and forth. First, you might classify it as a chart, then you might ask it to describe the type of chart, ask it to read the axises (or feed in OCR if the models aren’t great readers, and let them interpret it). You can ask to describe/interpret the contents of the graph. You can ask it to note any missing data, or whatever else. Then you can take all of that, and have it summarize it for something more helpful.
Better yet, you can make the AI drive itself. Code the first step of classification, then ask it what relevant details should be included. Then run through the list, feed it back through for a summary, and you get something more useful
That’s why I care so much about AI outreach. Because without learning anything about how neural networks work, a single individual could build something like this. Microsoft/OpenAI, Google and the rest of the tech giants are trying to brute force their way to making an LLM system that replaces workers. I don’t trust them (for hopefully obvious reasons) and I’d cheer if we broke them up, but they’re not all there is to AI
There’s so many building blocks out there free for the taking - you can download models and build things with them, you can just treat them as a black box and
As a species, we don’t understand how to use LLMs. They’re not useless, they’re misused. The only way that will change is if people start using these tools - and it’s much easier than it sounds if a technical person is motivated enough to learn. The initial configuration is painful… From there, it’s just passing in text/images/audio, and there’s exampls and libraries everywhere