They recruited people to pretend like they had various issues, and then recorded their interactions with the LLMs.
Someone who's been paid a couple of quid to pretend to have a medical condition can easily miss things, and is unlikely to be anywhere near as invested in drilling down to the correct solution as someone who's really suffering.
Another outcome from the study was that the LLMs could do better with the right people driving them. That's not news.
> You didn’t have a thyroid issue and you spent thousands more on tests the doctor was right that you didn’t need.
Uhhhh, even in the US, we're not talking "thousands" here.
> So… a telephone psychic?
Look, at one level, you can think of LLMs as search with a sometimes useful probability engine sitting on top of it.
As someone who had multiple doctors do their damnedest to kill me on multiple occasions, I was very grateful to have google search back in the day, and you bet your bottom dollar I use LLMs to help me with health issues today. They are often better than most doctors.
Does that put me at risk of doing something stupid? Only if I don't do further due diligence.
I don't claim to know the nuance of what you're trying to address with this.
Wouldn't it be simpler to simply protect a bitcoin private key with the encryption that you are challenging people to break?
Off the top of my head, the only downside I can see is that someone could drain the wallet without publishing the key, but people like to brag, so it seems unlikely to be a problem in practice.
That would work if you were only demonstrating encryption or creating challenges related to encryption, but some challenges don't map very easily to a cipher (though you might be able to get them to map to a cipher key).
In Simplicity (and in a sense in Bitcoin Script) there's a broader concept of "if you show you know information X, you're entitled to this money", but it has this specific issue that if the information or the entitlement to receive money for knowing it isn't unique to a specific recipient, there will automatically be a witness swiping or front-running risk for architectural reasons.
It's only the wrong lesson if you believe that making it more difficult for governments to seize and decrypt their own citizens' mobile phones with impunity is not a valid goal.
> the security model for trusted hardware is intrinsically flawed.
It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection.
The fact that some math-based protections may be theoretically better than physical protections does not obviate the utility of physical protections, whether we are discussing computers or phones, or houses or cars.
It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security. Even your putative perfect cryptographic security still relies on the physical security of the plant holding the keys.
> If you think trusted computing is a defense against nation-state attackers, we inhabit totally different realities.
I have no idea how or why you would think I think this, since what I wrote was exactly the opposite of this, e.g. "It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection" and "It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security."
In any case, if you think that every piece of information that ordinary humans want to protect is worth it for nation-states to waste their million-dollar attacks on, we inhabit totally different realities.
And yet, there are many pieces of information that ordinary humans want to protect that many nation states would easily throw thousands of dollars at.
In other words, the fundamentals behind security are the same as it ever was.
Yeah I don't think we disagree that much about this. But I'm not really worried about this particular habit forming risk. I can see where you're coming from though.
But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).
This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.
I guess I'm also pretty skeptical of the "automatically remember things about me" functionality. But I really like being able to say "hey make sure to remember this fact" and being able to ask about those things later.
For me the convenience of “hey remember this fact” is outweighed by a desire not to get stuck in a search or context bubble.
It might be nice to have better UI to control which bits of history get added to the context of a chat, but then just use a coding harness instead of web UI
Maybe. But I don't just use it for coding. For instance one thing I use it for is helping me track and evolve my workouts over time. It helps that it can remember the weight and number of reps I did the previous time. I could make an app for this, but it works well to do it purely within chat, with memory, and that's convenient. This is just an example, I use it this way for a number of things. I'm not going to use a coding harness for this kind of trivial use case!
My daughter is a pediatrician and just gave a talk on mental health problems (including suicides) brought on by the sort of personality that succumbs to this.
I find it interesting. For most of my life, I have gotten on well with (well-designed) machines. I'm the sort of guy who, when they bring me in to show me what's broken, it works in front of me.
Maybe I get on with well-designed machines better than people. Because people are never well-designed. So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy. But I never confuse any of my machines for people.
Yeah to me it's just "oh what a nice interface for compressing information and accessing it upon request!", not at all "I'm talking to a person". But I dunno, maybe we're the weird ones.
That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives. Sometimes you just want to get rid of an object that causes frustration. When that attitude is applied to humans, we usually call it a symptom of dehumanization.
> That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives.
Well, it may have been an overstatement, but not by much. Look, I have anger issues, but I never get angry at things because they are never trying to hurt me, and nothing good can come of it. I could probably fix most remote control issues (e.g. bad battery contact), but not after it's been smashed.
I also tend to feel the same way about, e.g., a rabid dog or vermin. Get rid of them, but not in anger.
I'm not saying it's rational either way. But getting angry at things is, at least as far as I can tell, normal for most people, without any subconscious idea those things are people.
> without any subconscious idea those things are people.
Right, but there is a subset of anthropomorphism that relates to sentient beings, which is what I was trying to get at. Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.
I will admit I don't know the exact feelings involved, because I generally don't have them. The closest I come is the anger I feel at the designers of IVR systems that are too stupid to answer your questions and too obstinate to connect you to a human. I admit to yelling at those, but honestly part of that is that I have read that some of them are designed to sense frustration in users and connect you faster to an agent in some cases. But I have no idea how true that is, or whether it's just like pressing the completely impotent "close door" button on an elevator.
> Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.
This is a real distinction, yes. I just don't see what it has to do with anthropomorphism. Like maybe you're saying the second one is more often directed at people-like entities? I don't feel that at all.
> So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy.
So… you think yourself “different” while acting like everyone else does when something doesn’t go as planned (unhappiness/sadness/disappointment/whatever)?
The "machines like me" is not a humble brag. It's an observed phenomenon, not just by me.
The "I'm different in how I react to them" probably doesn't put me at odds with the entire population, but certainly puts me at odds with a lot of individuals I have witnessed.
If you read my other comments, you'd see me contrasting myself with people who get angry with machines. I don't do that.
For whatever reason, I reserve anger for sentient beings who I believe are trying to fuck with me. That has its own set of problems, but I never have the problem of destroying inanimate objects in anger.
> So… you think yourself “different”
Yes.
> while acting like everyone else does
That's the point. I know for a fact that not everybody acts like me, never mind having the same facility with machines as I do.
Honestly, I think he's pointing out that the LLM creators have intended the LLMs to anothromorphize themselves.
Case in point: Gemini just asked me "Where should we start?". When I asked it if that turn of phrase was used by the creators to invite the users to anthropomorphize the model, it's first paragraph was:
Yes, to a significant extent. While system designers rarely state their goal as "making users believe the AI is a living being," tech companies deliberately design conversational agents to evoke social and relational instincts.
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