[_dwt]

It is, though, by the same argument also collectively dumber than the dumbest person who ever lived. No single human moron's brain could accommodate so much misinformation, useless fluff, spurious reasoning, etc. etc. etc.

So I think time will tell. My money is on a sort of regression to the mean: these models will capture the style and "creativity" of the average 2020s Reddit, StackOverflow, etc. user. I can't say I'm terribly excited.

[jstx1]

> It is, though, by the same argument also collectively dumber than the dumbest person who ever lived.

Not at all, it's not symmetrical. You're ignoring the training data and all the additional RLHF fine tuning. The model is being actively penalized for being dumb which is why it isn't that dumb in a lot of cases.

[grayhatter]

but the popular models plastered across HN are in fact, dumb in a lot of cases.

Everyone is impressed when the model does something they don't understand deeply. But it's very rare when someone is impressed when the model is generating text based in something they do understand deeply.

I do think it's slightly better than the mean across all topics. But I also strongly suspect it'll soon serve as a great example for regressing to the mean.