I've figured out what pisses me off so much about Facebook's Galactica demo.
It's not because people can use to to write bad essays for their homework. There are plenty of large language models that can do that. It's because Facebook is presenting it as something that it most definitely is not.
Facebook is selling it as a knowledge engine, a "new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe."
Actually it's just a random bullshit generator.
Let's take a look. Galactica can generate wikipedia articles, supposedly.
So let's see what they look like. Here's one for Brandolini's law, the principle that bullshit takes another of magnitude less effort create than to clean up.
Left: Galactica's attempt at creating a wikipedia entry
https://galactica.org/?prompt=wiki+article+on+brandolini%27s+law
Right: The actual wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
@Deacon @ct_bergstrom it’s a little more insidious than that bc it *sounds*, note for note, perfect.
it’s bullshit elevated to perfection
a bullshitter who doesn’t even know they’re bullshitting bc they’re not an intelligence and can’t “know” anything
Carl T. Bergstrom
Amy Hoy
Deacon