Sadly I don’t think the general populace understands that LLMs are unreliable. (And even people in tech can vastly overestimate the capabilities.. at least judging by the insane spending on them).
I think people in (software) tech are currently more prone to overestimate the capabilities, because LLMs in a harness are genuinely excellent at programming. Programming is the perfect LLM task since 1. it's symbolic manipulation, 2. there is a vast corpus of high quality training data, and 3. most mistakes can be harmlessly caught at compile-time or unit-test-time. Especially point 3 makes it so that just throwing more "effort" at a problem, something the machine is endlessly willing to do, virtually guarantees an improved result.
I've often seen the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" referenced with respect to LLMs. It is said that most people can tell the LLM is not great at their own subject of expertise, yet they still trust it for other subjects where they can't personally assess the quality of its answers. Imagine how bad this is when the LLM actually is great at the thing you have expertise in.
So it will probably come long after airplanes actually.
Not trusting my life to an “intelligence” that has nothing to lose.
If the only reason you give advice is predicated on the transactional value of that action, I think you've given up on acting ethically.
While to some extent we all are motivated by some abstract transactional value, I think immediately perceiving and reducing everything to a surivivalist, transactional mentality is an empty, cynical existence.
I’ll never understand mushroom culture.
But, I still enjoy the hunt every spring.
I used to go in the forest and find maybe 5 types of really tasty mushrooms, come back with enough for the whole family. Add some cheese and some onions and it's Michelin star in the mountains.
All image datasets have an intrinsic minimum error that comes from the limit of information in the data, regardless of what model or method you use to analyze it.
You might not be able to tell apart two similar-looking mushroom species just by looking.
Curiosity is great. Take a picture, enjoy what you find in nature. At the same time, stay safe and resist the urge to throw a random mushroom down your throat just because you might be able to. If you do reaaaaallly want to try a mushroom you can't find for consumption otherwise then it's worth the heavy amount of verification - but 99.9999% of mushrooms people eat don't need this step to be found safely.
There are no old bold mushroom hunters.
So even if it's wrong, a short verification usually reveals why it was wrong. I haven't had a situation yet where it was catastrophically wrong (i.e. the mushroom it called out looks nothing like the mushroom imaged). It also will generally warn of lookalikes.
I also use it a lot for general plant ID, and it's really impressive there too, with much lower stakes (I'm not eating those).
However it's very obvious that you shouldn't rely on them to decide what to put in your body. All those apps that I have seen (I guess the responsible ones?) will warn you not to do it. That's not what it's for.
(isn't that the standard proponents use for autonomous driving?)
https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
Or, what is needed before we are forced to give LLMs control of life or death decisions in the name of profits?
* Foraging is very satisfying to do
* Foraging allows you to participate in your cultural practices (although sadly many people in the US are long-cut off from such cultural knowledge)
* You can get fresher food foraging
* There absolutely are interesting varieties that aren't sold because they are hard to farm/transport/store etc.
* Foraged food is free
People have been foraging for mushrooms for literally thousands of years, but mushroom cultivation is pretty recent, and the overwhelming majority of edible species have not yet been reliably cultivated.
Are you ignorant of where those interesting flavors come from (indeed, are discovered)?
This has strong "why should we care about farms? People get everything they need from the store" vibes.
stared•42m ago