This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can't read at a seventh grade level.
Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.
No one has asked so I am going to ask:
What is Elon University and why should I trust them?
I suppose some of that comes down to the personal understanding of what "smart" is.
I guess you could call some person, that doesn't understand a topic, but still manages to sound reasonable when talking about it, and might even convince people that they actually have a deep understanding of that topic, "smart", in a kind of "smart imposter".
While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.
I know enough people for whom that's true.
Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?
There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.
I don't think a single human who knows as much as chatgpt does exists. Does that mean chatgpt is smarter then everyone? No. Obviously not based on what we've seen so far. But the amount of information available to these LLMs is incredible and can be very useful. Like a library contains a lot of useful information but isn't intelligent itself.
That's pretty weak reasoning, by your own words, it isn't intellignt, it doesnt know anything.
By that logic wikipedia is also smarter than any human because it has lot of knowledge.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.
It's a one trick pony.
That trick also happens to be a really neat trick that can make people think it's a swiss army knife instead of a shovel.
Just a thought, perhaps instead of considering the mental and educational state of the people without power to significantly affect this state, we should focus on the people who have power.
For example, why don't LLM providers explicitly and loudly state, or require acknowledgement, that their products are just imitating human thought and make significant mistakes regularly, and therefore should be used with plenty of caution?
It's a rhetorical question, we know why, and I think we should focus on that, not on its effects. It's also much cheaper and easier to do than refill years of quality education in individuals heads.
The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.
Aside from the unfortunate name of the university, I think that part of why LLMs may be perceived as smart or 'smarter' is because they are very articulate and, unless prompted otherwise, use proper spelling and grammar, and tend to structure their sentences logically.
Which 'smart' humans may not do, out of haste or contextual adaptation.
I wasn't sure from the title if it was "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are." or "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are." It's the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.
Either way, I'm not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn't answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they're generally good at meeting what people's expectations are of a "smart person", even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.
An llm simply has remembered facts. If that is smart, then sure, no human can compete.
Now ask an llm to build a house. Oh shit, no legs and cant walk. A human can walk without thinking about it even.
In the future though, there will be robots who can build houses using AI models to learn from. But not in a long time.
3d-printed concrete houses are already a thing, there's no need for human-like machines to build stuff. They can be purpose-built to perform whatever portion of the house-building task they need to do. There's absolutely no barrier today from having a hive of machines built for specific purposes build houses, besides the fact that no-one as of yet has stitched the necessary components together.
It's not at all out of the question that an AI can be trained up on a dataset of engineering diagrams, house layouts, materials, and construction methods, with subordinate AIs trained on the specific aspects of housing systems like insulation, roofing, plumbing, framing, electrical, etc. which are then used to drive the actual machines building the house. The principal human requirement at that point would be the need for engineers to check the math and sign-off on a design for safety purposes.
