small year-end observation of GenAI/LLM/transformer

gotten my own evidence of how far GenAI, based on the Transformer model, is going (or is going nowhere) yesterday while finalising my last piece of homework for 2025. GenAI, based on the Transformer model, works fundamentally by predicting what word(s) come next. and what made this ‘prediction’ possible? the dataset used in the training that the models have gone through informs this. in short, the Transformer, while ‘creative’, is creating based on existing patterns derived from dataset. and who created this dataset(s)? human thinking, thoughts, ideas, formed into words in the pre-GenAI era. and that dataset has long runout by now. you may read this article by de Gregorio to see all the ideas i have mentioned fall together.

long story short, whatever LLM provides you, it’s something that existed out there in its mega training dataset.

so, now back to my observation. this is the statement i wrote/created:
“With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), cyber actors have harnessed it for autonomising complex hacking activities”

after feeding the statement into PAIR (powered by claude), platform suggested:

“autonomising” –> “automate“ (clearer expression)

what’s clear, what’s not clear is subjective. but, “clearer” here is a conclusion of the algorithms based on the dataset. and why is “autonomising” less ‘clear’? by design, ‘clearness’ has to be interpreted based on its training dataset. begs another question, autonomising vs. automating/automate, which term is likely to appear more often in the dataset, and thus lends to the prediction of ‘clearness’? from my author’s point-of-view, PAIR’s suggestion is definitely not ‘clearer’ in representing what i intended for my readers. and, ‘autonomising’ is likely a relatively rare concept out there at the moment. to me, in this case, LLMs’ greatest limitation of being bounded by its dataset is somewhat revealed. asking a far stretch question, is the current conception of LLM/transformer going to lead to AGI? i think the answer is clear.

LLMs, chatgpt & ubi 4.0

with the blazing speed that LLMs are (or commonly known as “chatgpt”) developing, some people may be worried abt job security.

it looks more like a case of “the rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer” 贫者愈贫,富者愈富, not in the monetary sense, but the knowledge creation sense. more precisely, LLMs/chatgpt are going to make the expert-layman’s speed/efficiency gap ever bigger. layman can only (blindly, unknowingly, ‘trustingly’) copy-n-paste without understanding (cos they do not have enough prior knowledge to assess the output), while the expert can build on what LLMs/chatgpt throw out and idea-improve repeatedly with the system with further prompting and/or data input.

based on the above theory, to ensure everyone’s livelihood and well-being tmr (not limited to those who are worried abt job security), the idea of universal basic income (UBI) would probably need to upgrade to at least a 4.0:

UBI – food, water housing
UBI 2.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity
UBI 3.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity, wifi
UBI 4.0 – food, water, housing, power/electricity, wifi, negotiate/prompt LLMs

so what would UBI 4.0 mean for a k-12 school teacher? oh btw, openai just released its Code Interpreter within chatgpt4 few days ago. another game changer?

and thanks ziwei for the early brain-waking convo (: