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Jacques2Marais | 14 days ago

You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.

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jstummbillig|14 days ago

People poorly specifying problems and having bad models of what the other party can know (and then being surprised by the outcome) is certainly a more general albeit mostly separate issue.

ahofmann|14 days ago

This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer. The main goal of ai seems to get into this space and make a lot of people superflous and this also (partly) explains why everyone is pouring this amount of money into ai.

londons_explore|14 days ago

This is why we fed it the whole internet and every library as training data...

By now it should know this stuff.

jasongi|13 days ago

Future models know it now, assuming they suck in mastodon and/or hacker news.

Although I don't think they actually "know" it. This particular trick question will be in the bank just like the seahorse emoji or how many Rs in strawberry. Did they start reasoning and generalising better or did the publishing of the "trick" and the discourse around it paper over the gap?

I wonder if in the future we will trade these AI tells like 0days, keeping them secret so they don't get patched out at the next model update.

nkrisc|13 days ago

Even I don’t “know” how many “R”s there are in “strawberry”. I don’t keep that information in my brain. What I do keep is the spelling of the word “strawberry” and the skill of being able to count so that I can derive the answer to that question anytime I need.

j_maffe|14 days ago

Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.

dxdm|14 days ago

Wouldn't that be nice. I've been party and witness to enough misunderstandings to know that this is far from universally true, even for people like me who are more primed than average to spot missing context.

mlrtime|13 days ago

TIL my wife may be AI!

jiggawatts|13 days ago

I regularly tell new people at work to be extremely careful when making requests through the service desk — manned entirely by humans — because the experience is akin to making a wish from an evil genie.

You will get exactly what you asked for, not what you wanted… probably. (Random occurrences are always a possibility.)

E.g.: I may ask someone to submit a ticket to “extend my account expiry”.

They’ll submit: “Unlock Jiggawatts’ account”

The service desk will reset my password (and neglect to tell me), leaving my expired account locked out in multiple orthogonal ways.

That’s on a good day.

Last week they created Jiggawatts2.

The AIs have got to be better than this, surely!

I suspect they already are.

People are testing them with trick questions while the human examiner is on edge, aware of and looking for the twist.

Meanwhile ordinary people struggle with concepts like “forward my email verbatim instead of creatively rephrasing it to what you incorrectly though it must have really meant.”

scott_w|13 days ago

There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. However, we would want our tools to be more useful than the dumbest humans...

scott_w|13 days ago

> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other.

But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?

pickleRick243|13 days ago

But also why would you ask whether you should walk or drive if the car is at home? Either way the answer is obvious, and there is no way to interpret it except as a trick question. Of course, the parsimonious assumption is that the car is at home so assuming that the car is at the car wash is a questionable choice to say the least (otherwise there would be 2 cars in the situation, which the question doesn't mention).

kitd|13 days ago

Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.

WarmWash|13 days ago

Does that stat predate the modern digital age by a number of years?