Thomas FuchsJun 7

I saw a comment (which I can’t find anymore) of an extremely astute observation about LLMs:

People only ever attribute human-like attributes like cognition and reasoning to chatbot LLMs—but never to e.g. image generators. Which use the same algorithms and technical implementation.

Show threadAzuaron

@thomasfuchs Uhhh... no they DON'T use the same algorithms and technical implementation. Stable Diffusion is not the same thing as LLM/Markov chains. Not in algorithm, not in technical implementation.

This is actually one of my big complaints about "AI" discourse right now: "AI" doesn't mean anything specific, and "AI" boosters point at useful "AI" (like some machine learning algorithms) and use that to excuse ridiculous and wasteful "AI" (LLMs).

Different things are different, and it's important to be able to talk about those differences.

Note: I wouldn't consider either LLMs or Stable Diffusion to be "good" or "useful".

Jun 7 at 3:30pmWeb
Show threadAllie!Jun 7

@Azuaron @thomasfuchs you’re right in general for deployed systems at scale but diffusion language models are something being studied and worked, if you’re interested I recommend searching arxiv; some of the recent papers are pretty neat.

Agree about the AI terminology framing, I wish there was more specificity too.

Show threadAzuaronJun 7
@dotsie @thomasfuchs Sure, and Markov chain image generators are also being worked on. This just bolsters what I'm saying: if two language models aren't even the same algorithms and technical implementations, and two image generators aren't even the same algorithms and technical implementations, then there's no way that they're all just "the same algorithms and technical implementations."