Half of LLM users (49%) think the models they use are smarter than they are, including 26% who think their LLMs are “a lot smarter.” Another 18% think LLMs are as smart as they are. Here are some of the other attributes they see:
- Confident: 57% say the main LLM they use seems to act in a confident way.
- Reasoning: 39% say the main LLM they use shows the capacity to think and reason at least some of the time.
- Sense of humor: 32% say their main LLM seems to have a sense of humor.
- Morals: 25% say their main model acts like it makes moral judgments about right and wrong at least sometimes. Sarcasm: 17% say their prime LLM seems to respond sarcastically.
- Sad: 11% say the main model they use seems to express sadness, while 24% say that model also expresses hope.
I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults
Next you’ll tell me half the population has below average intelligence.
Not really endorsing LLMs, but some people…
pathologically stupid, and still wrong. yes.
Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are… or they’re dumb enough to be correct.
or they’re dumb enough to be correct.
That’s a bingo
Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don’t understand how LLMs work or what’s actually going on at the frontier of the field.
I feel like there’s going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.
AKA “future shock”
Wtf is an llm
Large language model. It’s what all these AI really are.
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
My new mental model for LLMs is that they’re like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.
I’m 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I’m not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.
A daily bite of horror.
That’s called a self-proving statement.
Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.
I should be more confident when communicating my hallucinations, it humanizes me.
Don’t they reflect how you talk to them? Ie: my chatgpt doesn’t have a sense of humor, isn’t sarcastic or sad. It only uses formal language and doesn’t use emojis. It just gives me ideas that I do trial and error with.
While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don’t actually “know” anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps “words” to other “words” to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees “I love” what probably comes next is “my mom|my dad|ect”. Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at “answering” a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.
AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.
Is stringing words together really considered knowledge?
As much as a search engine is
Does it have agency?
Then yss
If they’re strung together correctly then yeah.
It’s semantics. The difference between an llm and “asking” wikipedia a knowledge question is that the llm will “answer” you with predictive text. Both things contain more knowledge than you do, as in they have answers to more trivia and test questions than you ever will.
I have a new word for you: information
I guess I can see that, maybe my understanding of words or their implication is incorrect. While I would agree they contain more knowledge I guess that reads different to me than being more knowledgeable. I think that maybe it comes across as anthropomorphizing a dataset of information to me. I could easily be wrong.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
“Nearly half” of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was “level 2”. 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were “non-starters”, unable to complete the questionnaire.
For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :
- Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
- Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can’t read at a seventh grade level.
Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
Specifically it is about 75% of the population being functionally or clinically illiterate as I said. This is more likely caused by the fact that American culture is anti intellectual, and not the lack of being taught etymology, as etymology has little to do with literacy.
Does that even actually help in English lmao
Better than entomology, which just bugs me.
Yes, English is absolutely full of words that can be deciphered from their roots.
I’d be curious, it seems more common in Latin based languages, whereas English seems to be a lot more… Free form?
English is a mish-mash hodgepodge of two dozen other languages, many (most?) of which are Romantic/Latin-based.
There is an etymology word joke that says something along the lines of, “if “pro” is the opposite of “con”, then is the opposite of “congress” “progress”?”
And if you don’t know etymology, then that seems to make sense.
When you break down the word Congress, you get the prefix con and the root word gress, con means with, and gress means step, so it means to step with or to walk with.
The opposite of walking with someone is to walk apart from someone, so, the actual opposite of congress would be digress, and the opposite of progress would be regress.
Etymology is great at ruining jokes, but it’s also great at helping you understand what words mean and why they mean them.
so, the actual opposite of congress would be digress
How about transgress.
The word trans means across, or on the other side, and gress once again would mean step, so to transgress is basically to cross the line, right?
I did a quick search, but there isn’t really a word to describe the people that don’t cross the line.
The opposite of the prefix trans is the prefix cis, which means “on the same side”
Maybe if the adults actually didn’t use the LLMs so much this wouldn’t be the case.
