[kromokromo]

This is just doomerism. Even though this model is slightly better than the previous, using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away. I work in healthcare tech in a European country and yes we use AI for image recognition on x-rays, retinas etc but these are fundamentally completely different models than a LLM.

Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future, someone might use some other variation of AI for this but LLMs are not very effective on this.

[dbspin]

AI is already being used for picking targets in warzones - https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-ta....

LLM's will of course also be used, due to their convenience and superficial 'intelligence', and because of the layer of deniability creating a technical substrate between soldier and civilian victim provides - as has happened for two decades with drones.

[throwthrowuknow]

Why? There are many other types of AI or statistical methods that are easier, faster and cheaper to use not to mention better suited and far more accurate. Militaries have been employing statisticians since WWII to pick targets (and for all kinds of other things) this is just current-thing x2 so it’s being used to whip people into a frenzy.

[mike_hearn]

Note that the IDF explicitly denied that story:

https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-art...

Probably this is due to confusion over what the term "AI" means. If you do some queries on a database, and call yourself a "data scientist", and other people who call themselves data scientists do some AI, does that mean you're doing AI? For left wing journalists who want to undermine the Israelis (the story originally appeared in the Guardian) it'd be easy to hear what you want to hear from your sources and conflate using data with using AI. This is the kind of blurring that happens all the time with apparently technical terms once they leave the tech world and especially once they enter journalism.

[wolfd]

It’s absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely something that some companies are trying to sell regardless of the many known failure modes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us...

https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU

[goopthink]

I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we’ve evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto their feature set as an “AI” improvement. Some of the newer startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy UI. We’ve passed on most of these but not all. And these companies have clients, real world case studies. It’s not just not very far away, it is actively here.

[lhoff]

>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future

I guess the future is now then: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how...

Excerpt:

>Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers.

>In an interview published before the war, he said it was “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”.

>According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”

[agos]

nothing in this says they used an LLM

[coldtea]

>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd

You'd be surprised.

Not to mention it's also used for military and intelligence "analysis".

>using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away

When immaturity and unfitness for purpose has ever stopped companies selling crap?

[exe34]

> picking targets in military operations

I'm 100% on the side of Israel having the right to defend itself, but as I understand it, they are already using "AI" to pick targets, and they adjust the threshold each day to meet quotas. I have no doubt that some day they'll run somebody's messages through chat gpt or similar and get the order: kill/do not kill.

[mlnj]

'Quotas each day to find targets to kill'.

That's a brilliant and sustainable strategy. /s

[ExoticPearTree]

I use ChatGPT in particular to narrow down options when I do research, and it is very good at this. It wouldn't be far-fetched to feed it a map, traffic patterns and ask it to do some analysis of "what is the most likeliest place to hit"? And then take it from there.

[currymj]

i don't know about European healthcare but in the US, there is this huge mess of unstructured text EMR and a lot of hope that LLMs can help 1) make it easier for doctors to enter data, 2) make some sense out of the giant blobs of noisy text.

people are trying to sell this right now. maybe it won't work and will just create more problems, errors, and work for medical professionals, but when did that ever stop hospital administrators from buying some shiny new technology without asking anyone.