4 ms·

I don't really understand the confusion. An LLM predicts the most probable word (token technically), that's it. There is always a most probable word given any

I don't really understand the confusion. An LLM predicts the most probable word (token technically), that's it. There is always a most probable word given any input (even if it makes no sense). Let's you try to complete the following sentence "My name is larry and my favorite color is: ". If you've seen training data that said larry's favorite color is blue, then you say "blue". If you have no data related to larry's favorite color, no idea who larry is, you have no way of knowing what the next word will be. However you know it will likely be a color, and maybe "orange" is the most common one you've seen, so you say "orange". it makes perfect sense in this context, it looks correct, might even be correct. But an LLM doesn't "know" if it's correct, its just the most probable. This is why it's so good at making things up. It can predict what would look correct. It has no "idea" what the answers are ever, it's always a best guess, and you can only really see this behaviour when it "hallucinates". --- Edit: For fun I asked GPT-4 "Complete the following sentence: "Jeremy's favorite food is jKDFJ9 cake, which is made of:" It's response was "Jeremy's favorite food is jKDFJ9 cake, which is made of a unique combination of ingredients such as chocolate, hazelnuts, and a touch of exotic spices, giving it a distinct and unforgettable flavor."

deafpolygon 4y ago
I get: "I'm sorry, but "jKDFJ9 cake" is not a known or recognizable food item or recipe. It's possible that it's a made-up name or a personal creation. Can you please provide more context or details about what "jKDFJ9 cake" is or what it might be made of? Without more information, I cannot complete the sentence." OpenAI ChatGPT March 23 Version.
- nicpottier 4y ago
  Same, though I don't know why, GP matches my understanding as well.
  - thewataccount 4y ago
    Are you using GPT-4 or GPT-3.5? I find that GPT-4 is actually better at making full responses. I actually dislike the term "hallucinate" and generally prefer it to do so, GPT3.5 is harder to make fantastical text with. GPT-3.5 gives me the same result as you and the above commenter. In that example, the RLHF training/tuning has weighted it to think that "I'm sorry [etc]" is the most probable best sequence of words. GPT-4 is reliably giving me similar results such as "Jeremy's favorite food is jKDFJ9 cake, which is made of a unique combination of dark chocolate, crushed nuts, and zesty orange flavor, topped with a rich caramel drizzle." I find this interestingly because GPT-4 is supposed to "hallucinate" less, I think it's just better at determining when you intend for it to do so.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  > OpenAI ChatGPT March 23 Version. They've been changing it without telling us AFAIK. Asking for it to (I forget the exact prompt) to "make a scientific paper about the discovery that ferrets can breathe underwater." now reliably makes a proper response, and it looks more consistently formatted for GPT-3.5 just recently. Previously it would say "Well actually ferrets can't breathe underwater", and when it did answer it wasn't super well formatted. So I think they're tuning their RLHF. ALthough i could be completely wrong on the timeline and maybe it was the 23rd

deafpolygon 4y ago

I get: "I'm sorry, but "jKDFJ9 cake" is not a known or recognizable food item or recipe. It's possible that it's a made-up name or a personal creation. Can you please provide more context or details about what "jKDFJ9 cake" is or what it might be made of? Without more information, I cannot complete the sentence." OpenAI ChatGPT March 23 Version.

nicpottier 4y ago
Same, though I don't know why, GP matches my understanding as well.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  Are you using GPT-4 or GPT-3.5? I find that GPT-4 is actually better at making full responses. I actually dislike the term "hallucinate" and generally prefer it to do so, GPT3.5 is harder to make fantastical text with. GPT-3.5 gives me the same result as you and the above commenter. In that example, the RLHF training/tuning has weighted it to think that "I'm sorry [etc]" is the most probable best sequence of words. GPT-4 is reliably giving me similar results such as "Jeremy's favorite food is jKDFJ9 cake, which is made of a unique combination of dark chocolate, crushed nuts, and zesty orange flavor, topped with a rich caramel drizzle." I find this interestingly because GPT-4 is supposed to "hallucinate" less, I think it's just better at determining when you intend for it to do so.
thewataccount 4y ago
> OpenAI ChatGPT March 23 Version. They've been changing it without telling us AFAIK. Asking for it to (I forget the exact prompt) to "make a scientific paper about the discovery that ferrets can breathe underwater." now reliably makes a proper response, and it looks more consistently formatted for GPT-3.5 just recently. Previously it would say "Well actually ferrets can't breathe underwater", and when it did answer it wasn't super well formatted. So I think they're tuning their RLHF. ALthough i could be completely wrong on the timeline and maybe it was the 23rd