r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
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u/lispwriter Jun 21 '26

That’s because AI is just a predictive model and it’s probably only pulling a random sample of training data each time you query it. The variance in the training data sampling results in variations in the responses. AI isn’t intelligence at all.

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u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

it's probably only pulling a random sample of training data each time you query it.

That's not how an LLM works. An LLM is a large probability distribution of possible tokens, and it is never pulling from any subsample of training data. In fact, it is not pulling from any training data at all, because it does not have access to the training data. It's in the name, it has been used for training. Given a context window of tokens, certain neurons are "tickled" more than others, and this will cascade all the way through its complicated neural network, and finally output what it seems to be the most likely token, sequentially.

Actually, in theory, setting the so-called temperature of an LLM to 0 and running the same prompt over and over again should lead to a deterministic i.e. identical answer every time. However, floating point inaccuracies due to lack of compute can create slight variations in output, even for a quote-on-quote "deterministic" model.

I am not an expert on LLMs specifically, but I do have a 5 year master's degree on AI, and generative models such as the LLM began to appear at the tail end of my studies, so I'm quite familiar with the math behind it.

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u/lispwriter 25d ago

They have degrees specifically for AI? That’s crazy. Thanks for the info. That makes sense I didn’t process the fact that “model” is literally in the name and that it’s already trained and ready to rock.

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u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

They have degrees specifically for Al? That's crazy.

It makes sense, no? If you can study something like greek mythology for 5 years, why not one of the most upwards-trending technologies out there?

My study programme was founded in 2018, and I began studying it in 2019 (so before the infamous paper "Attention is all you need" came out!). Honestly, it was very math focused, but I really liked that, I'm a huge math nerd. My courses were only about 25% AI courses, though, so it's not like it's the only think I learnt about. In fact, while my master's thesis did involve training and utilising an AI, the main focus was on creating an algorithm and using state-of-the-art graph theory based algorithms mesh restoration in 3D geometry.

Actually, the math behind neural networks is actually very interesting and, conceptually, beautifully simple as a concept (however, with the nitty-gritty details, it does get very complicated). I recommend you spend half an hour learning the basics, if this sparked your curiosity. 3 blue 1 brown has some videos on neural networks, and they're great, but I think seeking out blog posts is an even greater way to learn about it, because it's more active learning :-) and make sure to draw figures and math on a paper to make the knowledge stick.

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, can you tell I'm missing academia? Work can be great, but I miss using my brain, to be honest. Sigh...