Artificial Generalized Incompetence

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    How about the outlet checks and finds out?

    I did, and I couldn’t get low-temperature Gemini or a local LLM to replicate it, and not all the tariffs seem to be based on the trade deficit ratio, though some suspiciously are.

    Sorry, but this is a button of mine, outlets that ask stupidly easy to verify questions but dont even try. No, just cite people on Reddit and Twitter…

    • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      though some suspiciously are.

      Some? A huge portion are. Numerous others have replicated it with visual proof. I agree that the news sites should be verifying it, but NYT did and also documented their proof.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      10 days ago

      That bothers me too. Get an actual expert source to verify before you publish shit from randos on Twitter and Reddit.

        • MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works
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          10 days ago

          “these lazy fucks in the government are using ai to come up with policy”

          Also news outlet

          “I am too lazy to do the laziest thing I’m angry about, even though it’s my literal job”

          • Yoga@lemmy.ca
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            10 days ago

            “News outlet” is a huge stretch. It’s a crypto currency blog pretending to be news.

        • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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          10 days ago

          But that doesn’t confirm or deny that Trumps formula came from ChatGPT, they could both be drawing from some other source.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            You can generally toggle LLM “grounding” features, aka inserting web searches into their context.

            Modern LLMs have a information “cutoff” of a few months ago, at the latest, so the base models will have zero awareness of this formula.

            • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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              10 days ago

              Unless the formula came from something that already existed that both Trumps people and these models are referencing to come up with the same number.

    • Grostleton@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      Because the article is likely just more GenAI vomit, and an LLM doesn’t have any degree of deductive reasoning ability to begin with.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        TBH it’s probably human written.

        I used to write small articles for a tech news outlet on the side (HardOCP), and the entire site went under well before the AI boom because no one can compete with conveyer belts of of thoughtless SEO garbage, especially when Google promotes it.

        Point being, this was a problem well before the rise of LLMs.

    • prole
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      10 days ago

      Are you annoyed that they didn’t try to replicate it, or that they’re disparaging LLMs?

  • Komodo Rodeo@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I mean, I’m not going to spend time trying to duplicate their results, but it wouldn’t even slightly surprise me. Cops have been using ChatGPT to streamline their bullshit cop-lingo incident reports, to the extent that it’s caught the notice of lawyers and judges… 100% I believe that the dolts who shit out Trump’s tariff rates used it too.

  • elfin8er@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Did ChatGPT come up with the color of the sky? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same color for the sky, several X users claim.

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        the point is chat GPT is trained on ideas people have already had. it’s not inventing Trump’s economic theory out of thin air.

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        the numbers Trump posted are questionable at best

        I’m less diplomatic: the numbers that Trump posted are flagrant bullshit.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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    10 days ago

    what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised and they just refer to that because they have nothing else to base the questions about that specific topic on?

    I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is. It wouldnt surprise me if it was based only to whatever happened to be going through the madmans mind at the time.

    • kyle@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      The numbers come from an overly simple way to level out trade deficits.

      So if I sell you $100 in goods and you sell me $120 dollars in goods, I’m “losing” money, therefore 20% tariff (tax to sell me something). In reality, you’re going to increase your prices and sell me $140 worth of the same stuff.

      All the AIs did was expand this to a global scale, what’s insane to me is that the math adds up. It doesn’t take an AI to do this though, some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing. Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        what’s insane to me is that the math adds up

        Too bad it’s based on wrong assumptions. It’s not the arithmetic that’s the issue, it’s the model.

        some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing

        And if they did it on a test, they’d flunk it.

        Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.

        Yeah, it fails to understand the rationale for comparative advantage (there’s a reason Ecuador exports more bananas than Norway does), and it also fails to consider the balance-of-payments effect of things like foreign direct investment (which looks zero-sum when it first takes place but means the profits are outflows from that point on, unless the foreign investors choose to reinvest them).

        Also I don’t think the idiots who came up with that table know the difference between a current account balance and balance of trade.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Yeah, this makes sense to me. ChatGPT isn’t crunching the numbers, looking at conservative ideology, foreign policy goals and media optics before recommending the ideal number for the trump admin to implement. Instead it’s just looking for the most widely publicized set of numbers in relation to that query and regurgitating that.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOP
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      10 days ago

      what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

      Then I’d ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we’ve got an AI that’s built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it’s just as likely they’re ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

      That’s sort of the problem with AI. There’s no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that’s already inelegant and resource intensive).

      I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

      The problem is less that we don’t know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don’t know either. They’re fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don’t even know if they’ve got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.

  • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    Actually, it was the Palantir Gotham threat model… which has a backend to a private chatgpt model :(

  • ArchRecord@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    I tried replicating this myself, and got no similar results. It took enough coaxing just to get the model to not specify existing tariffs, then to make it talk about entire nations instead of tariffs on specific sectors, then after that it mostly just did 10, 12, and 25% for most of the answers.

    I have no doubt this is possible, but until I see some actual amount of proof, this is entirely hearsay.

  • futatorius@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    Probably one of Musk’s little goons was given the task, and they immediately went to ChatGPT.