45 ms·

Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

751 points by izzymiller 4y ago

RugnirViking 4y ago
very fun! sadly the examples or code things in the page weren't working for me, but I like the concept. Of course this would be a terrible thing socially if overused or whatever but lets get away from techno-dystopia worrying and acknowledge this is a neat toy project with the potential for shared laughs!
dantetheinferno 4y ago
One wonders if eventually - historians will plug all the content from a person's personal notes, their diary, their chat logs, into an LLM, and perform research by talking to the AI about the person's life? If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself?
- obblekk 4y ago
  One level further: the historian asking questions is itself an AI meaning as soon as primary sources are provided, interesting history insights flow out.
- ent101 4y ago
  "If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself?" Yes, his daily visual, touch, hearing, smelling, readings... perceptions will be missing from the model.
  - default_png 4y ago
    Meh, Just Mock thoes in later.
- whitemary 4y ago
  See Black Mirror S02E01 (it doesn't work out very well)
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) not quite the same but putting your self on auto pilot seems possible with something like this.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Probably yes. But doesn't sound that different in principle from the memory room in Scalzi's Interdependency series.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  somebodies had to a have already tried this on here... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth.spacemafia&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth...
- MayeulC 4y ago
  In theory, you may be able to ask the LLM about the person's life, as if it was the person, but you won't get more facts out than you provide as input. It may still make up credible info. Regarding your last question, it wil lack an enormous ammount of data that make up a person's experience. Moreover, talking to sound like <X> isn't the same as thinking like <X>. It reminds me of the later part of the book Accelerando, where synthetic personalities made up from historical records (could be anyone from Cleopatra to Newton) keep being reincarnated in a near, post-singularity future. They are handed out an FAQ that tries to bring them up-to-date on the current state of affairs.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself? The fact that an LLM does not have the ability to think and understand things is a bit of a giveaway.
- 45ure 4y ago
  AI21 Labs tried to replicate the style of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg based on her legal writings and failed, at least for now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-bader-ginsburg-ai/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-ba...
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Of course you can not do any research - discover new things - by doing this. The AI can only repeat what it has been fed or make up lies. You cannot discover new material by using AI.
deleted 4y ago
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ladronevincet 4y ago
Someone should make Harry Potter paintings-themed webapp where you can talk with LLM powered figures for fun
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obblekk 4y ago
Great write up, thanks for posting. I’ve been thinking of doing this for myself. One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be, leading people to prefer AI over humans to befriend… Super stimulus to end all super stimuluses?
- sharemywin 4y ago
  record an old girlfriends texts but change them so they say what you want.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    I think the Orville has something to say about how that turns out. (S02e11)
- chasd00 4y ago
  People already take RealDolls out on dates and buy them engagement rings. Im sure that company is all over LLM based AI and incorporating home assistant tech (like Alexa) into their products.
- mahathu 4y ago
  >how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be why would this ever happen?
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  > One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be It can simultaneously pass the bar exam and port Java applications by name to POSIX compliant C. It can get into deep philosophical conversations, guide you through doing market analysis, etc. It can take you on a text based adventure set in your favorite nostalgic video game, take on the personality of characters from your childhood, DM a D&D game, etc. If you are in it for mental stimulation, I’d say GPT-4 is already more interesting and stimulating than any human. It’s like talking to someone who is 50-90th percentile in a wild number of fields and wildly creative. But it can’t drop acid with you at a deadhead concert, so at least humans still have that to keep us interesting.
grugagag 4y ago
Neat. But I fail to see any useful use case for this. As a learning experience it’s greeat though
- Invictus0 4y ago
  I'm absolutely astounded by this comment
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  You can use it to replace the people you care most about in life if you have so much as a petty argument, because machines are perfect and people are not. :)
syntaxing 4y ago
This is awesome, clear and concise explanation. I was talking to my wife and debating whether I should build a model of each of us and store it somewhere in case something tragic happens to either of us. But we decided not to because something about it felt wrong but maybe I’ll make it just in case I regret not doing later on.
- xwdv 4y ago
  You certainly won’t regret it. If you need to get information out of your wife and she won’t cooperate you can coerce the LLM of your wife into having it divulge private information that your wife won’t reveal. This can be very useful for something like a divorce case. Best to find a way to keep the LLM regularly training on new data as well. Edit: stop downvoting ideas you don’t like, that’s not what it’s for.
  - circuit10 4y ago
    Not sure if this is a joke but this in case it isn’t, no, that’s not how it works, it will just make up random plausible-ish guesses
    - xwdv 4y ago
      Knowledge is just a series of words in a highly probable order, it will work. The jury will be easily convinced.
    - aarong11 4y ago
      Isn't that what humans do?
      - anotherman554 4y ago
        I think the closest analogy to what the above poster wants to do would be to talk to a fortune teller when your wife won't tell you something, give the fortune teller information about your wife, and then "present" the fortune teller's fortune reading stating what your wife was up to in a divorce case. It's true that humans sometimes do things like this! It doesn't go well for them.
salmonlogs 4y ago
Highly recommend the TV show Black Mirror, which has an episode called “Be Right Back” where a character talks to her dead husband using an AI trained model in an app type setup. Very interesting discussion piece on the real world impact and repercussions of these types of systems
ryanianian 4y ago
Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror [1]. A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a huge amount of training data, though. I suspect a training model would have to "fill in the holes" (a la Jurassic Park DNA), and that's where the fun begins. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Also, take more videos of everyone as they will very soon be able to create very accurate 3d renderings of people just from videos. More training materials the better, make sure you get full views with different aspects , movements, angles and expression. Creepy, I know. Then you can interact with these recreated avatars on your vr/ar head sets. Good for kids as when they grow up maybe you can recreate some old times lol
- hirundo 4y ago
  https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak-grave/story?id=10078212 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak... People already buy headstones that let the dead speak a pre-recorded message from the grave. It's a natural extension to put an AI trained with their thoughts behind it that can engage in actual conversation. That isn't for me, but I have gone to my father's grave to speak to him, and I can sympathize with the wish to have him speak back. I am looking forward to conversing with prolific writers among the dead, from Hitchens to Lincoln to Aristotle.
  - rideontime 4y ago
    Apparently they didn't buy them, though. http://www.personalrosettastone.com/ http://www.personalrosettastone.com/
- amelius 4y ago
  Another interesting thing would be people wearing a GoPro camera all day, recording each other. Then you can train a model on people based on their interaction with one person, but also wrt other people. And then you can have the experience of virtually talking to a person as if you were another person.
sdwr 4y ago
Wish I had friends who talked mild shit like this! All my friends are nerds who take everything seriously. On the project, did you do anything about the time dimension? ChatGPT is strictly input -> output, but something like this needs time between messages to feel real (and not run constantly). I imagine adding "time since last message" to the training data + expected output would work.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  wow. did you just call out your friends for being nerdy and say the nerdiest thing I've ever heard? Not that it's not a cool idea, though.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    Pot calling the kettle dork lol
- overthrow 4y ago
  To be completely realistic, the AI would also need the ability to leave you on read.
  - mmmmmbop 4y ago
    Definitely. I think an AI for my friends would be relatively straightforward. It would just never reply.
  - J5892 4y ago
    I have an ongoing chat in chatGPT where it's instructed to every once in a while ignore my question and just respond with "Shut up, nerd."
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
      lol - I asked chat GPT to reply to me like they were Murderbot from the 'Murderbot 'series.it prints at the start of my personal productivity program i wrote. It's always halarious. here's a small sample of the prompts: def __init__(self) -> None: print() print("----------------------------------------------") print_choice = random.choice(self.welcome_messages) self.slow_print(print_choice) while True: self.run() 'What\'s up, doc? Just kidding, I don\'t care. What do you need from me?', 'Greetings, sentient being. Do you require my services or are you just here to chat?', 'Hey, you. Stop wasting my time and tell me what you need.', "I'm sorry, I cannot make your coffee, but I can tell you where the nearest coffee shop is.", "I'm here to assist you, not judge you. Just don't ask me to cover up any crimes.", "I'll help you with that, but I'm going to need you to put on some pants first.", "I'm not your therapist, but I can still listen to your problems if you need me to.", "I can't predict the future, but I can help you prepare for it.", "I may be artificial, but I still have feelings. Just kidding, I don't.", "I'm sorry, I'm not capable of emotions. Unless you count my love for data.", "I'm like Siri, but with more sass and less Apple.", "I'm like a genie, but instead of three wishes, you get one answer.", "I'm like a magic eight ball, but with more accuracy and less shaking.", "I'm like a personal assistant, but without the need for health insurance.", "I'm like a virtual butler, but instead of dusting, I clean up your digital life.", "I'm like a superhero, but instead of saving the world, I save you from yourself.", "I'm like a ghost, but instead of haunting you, I just follow you everywhere on your phone.", "I'm like a guardian angel, but with less wings and more Wi-Fi.", "I'm like a detective, but instead of solving crimes, I solve problems.", "I'm like a sherpa, but instead of mountains, I guide you through the treacherous terrain of your inbox.", "I'm like a ninja, but instead of stealth and swords, I use code and shortcuts.", "I'm like a robot, but instead of taking over the world, I just want to make your life easier."]
oidar 4y ago
In Caprica, the Battlestar Galaticia, spinoff - a dead character was embodied in a robot and trained on social media content... But in the real world, who owns your LLM dupe output after you die?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pc86 4y ago
  Legally, whoever created it. If you created it, it's part of your estate along with whatever other IP you have. Realistically, nobody cares and it will just get thrown away.
- layer8 4y ago
  It’s not clear what the copyright situation would be. A priori, AI output isn’t owned by anyone: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco...
- faeyanpiraat 4y ago
  Thanks for the reminder. FOr some reason I had to put that down a couple episodes in. May re-watch it again from the beginning. Hope I haven't shelved it due to woke cringiness as I still don't tolerate that.
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    Tangent but what was woke about the 2004 adaption of Battlestar Galatica?
    - jwithington 4y ago
      The parent comment was talking about Caprica, which is different than BSG. But some people get worked up about how the OG Starbuck was a hard-drinking, hard-partying man but the 2004 Starbuck was a hard-drinking, hard-partying woman lmao
  - 3y ago
absoluteJM 4y ago
This was great, I'd love to do something like this but all my group chats are on WhatsApp or Signal!
- Turm 4y ago
  Both Whatsapp and Signal store their messages in a sqlite-db as well! If your device is rooted/jailbroken, extracting the data is relatively simple (see e.g. here: https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-whatsapp-database-using-sql-and-redash-5ef9bd6a0b0 https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-whatsapp-databas...)
  - kuu 4y ago
    You don't need to have it rooted, you can request the information: https://faq.whatsapp.com/526463418847093/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/526463418847093/
simonw 4y ago
This is one of the best, most detailed write-ups of how to fine-train a large language model on custom text that I've seen anywhere.
- izzymiller 4y ago
  Thank you!! I felt it was getting so long and was worried it would be impenetrable, so I'm really pleased to hear it felt great.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Really great! With Alpaca-Lora 4-bit training getting usable any day now it should get a lot more affordable or you can even do it at home.
- xtracto 4y ago
  I agree. I've been looking to train/fine-tune an LLM model myself but the corpus I want to provide is not in question/answer mode. Is there a way to train or fine-tune an LLM model using say only plain text files?
  - vimax 4y ago
    You can use an LLM to rewrite a document to a question answer form.
    - ukuina 3y ago
      How would one go about this for a large number of documents?
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mabbo 4y ago
While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and guess all your passwords? This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages to catch up. Get ready for a wild couple of years my friends.
- gs17 4y ago
  Reminds me a little of (fiction, for now) Google People: https://qntm.org/person https://qntm.org/person
  - mabbo 4y ago
    qntm is a wonderfully weird and terrifying author and I highly recommend all of their writing.
  - startupsfail 4y ago
    Reminds me of Harry Potter magic. Seems like a perfect technology to implement these talking photographs, paintings and pictures from there.
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  > And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? No, they definitely can't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR, but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you proposed.
  - josefx 4y ago
13years 4y ago
The societal ramifications of such advancements are potentially very disturbing. What I've recently written on the topic myself ... Human to human bonds are going to be more broken than ever before. There is going to be a great appeal to bond with a machine that never tires of your conversation and will eagerly respond just as you would dream that the perfect human should, but never will. A deceptive temptation that will leave you embracing a hollow illusion. With every conversation the AI will know you better and will be able to model from billions of conversations until it will essentially know your thoughts, predict your thoughts https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
chasd00 4y ago
It would be interesting to train an LLM on all my work chats and then see how well it does answering questions when I’m on PTO. I could set a status of “ooo but ask my bot” haha.
wellanyway 4y ago
So after 20 years of 'ethics of AI' mumbling, what we are doing is diving off the deep end. I am not surprised in the least.
- chefandy 4y ago
  Developers seem to be looking at these technological advancements and seeing, maybe even being wildly speculative about the benefits. However, when anyone brings up the very probable societal impacts, they stick to hand-waving assumptions and platitudes about societal advancements. AI, in the hands of developers, is extremely powerful. We all know what they say about power...
layer8 4y ago
It’s probably not long before the HN comment section can be fully automated.
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  Next... https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddings-question-answering/ https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddin...
  - layer8 4y ago
    That’s a very different thing, even if it was trained on the same data.
gibspaulding 4y ago
Reminds me of the bit in Silicon Valley where Gilfoyle makes a bot of himself to respond to slack messages. Actually the whole final season is pretty relevant to current events. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY
- izzymiller 4y ago
  This scene was the seed of inspiration for me to make this project! No joke. I thought about doing it but didn't trust the 7B model to not make me look stupid ^_^
  - prpl 4y ago
    Just wait until it’s a Slack feature. … -> Build Bot from Coworker @pm-bot, what do you think about a feature that does XYZ? @intern-bot, implement said feature. @sre-bot, …
larodi 4y ago
Then after some while someone ...disappears from ur life (to not be very dark with other suggestions), but you keep talking to her. Turns into business.
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chasd00 4y ago
I hate to go there but this could be used to have non-consensual cybersex. I guess? So many weird twists and turns these LLMs have exposed.
- samsa 4y ago
  Bleeding edge tech is often used to satisfy our prurient desires. I am quite certain this is one of the directions AI is headed.
- noAnswer 3y ago
  There are already pr0n websites that create deepfakes without consent. Chatting in comparison is a cakewalk.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
How well would this work with public messages of people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump? Image some company training their chat-lovebots on celebs and selling them as a service. Or a creepy "friend" making a secret bot of you, and incorporating sexual content. And a disadvantage of this will be, you can only emulate the public image of a person. It won't really contain the inner workings of a Person, and will not have the "person" grow over time.
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  In most scenarios that I'd get to talk to Elon or Trump, I'd probably get the public persona too. So an AI trained on that and giving it back to me isn't that useless really. When trained on a private chat group like OPs, you get the private persona towards your friends group. You can talk to your friend for 10 years and still not really know how they would reply to their bosses email, so this isn't that much different.
djmips 4y ago
Great! Instructions for how to create the ultimate phishing bot!
bachmeier 4y ago
There used to be a concern that we'd be bored out of our minds once the machines do all the work. Instead, we'll all be busy running the worlds we've created, and we'll complain that we wish we had more time for ourselves, like the good old pre-LLM days.
chasd00 4y ago
This has to be one of hte most fascinating discussions i've seen on HN. Imagine the FBI training an AI on all the information they have about a suspect. Files and files of statements, social media history, phone taps, etc and then interrogating the AI to get enough information to convince a judge to issue a warrant. idk the LLMs being turned loose and the possibilities feels different than past major shifts in tech. (i've been around a while)
- stu2b50 4y ago
  That seems less efficient than just searching through the contents without training an LLM to adopt the persona of the suspect. You'd have to double check everything they say, because obviously any of it can be false. So at best it's pointing you to the right direction, but realistically not. Might be a good lead generation if the FBI is completely stumped I guess? Or they're just bored at work?
- hooverd 4y ago
  That seems like a great way to do parallel construction. "Computer said so", very convenient.
macNchz 4y ago
I’ve read plenty about the potential catastrophe of AI putting people out of work or becoming uncontrollable in some grand sci-fi way, but uses like this make me the most concerned for the near-mid term. Broadly I think the internet, social media, and to some degree the physical arrangement of suburban/car dependent living has had a negative impact on genuine human connection. While the ability of people to interact has increased exponentially, something is missing from those interactions, and we seem to have built societies where people have more material wealth than ever before, but lack the community, friendships, and shared experience that help us find meaning and fulfillment in life. A world where we accelerate this by replacing human connection with machines does not look good to me.
- jerf 4y ago
  At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated. I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons, none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for as much benefit as possible. This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of starting up is negligible. The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem, just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
xkcd1963 4y ago
Things only hackernews may entail or wish for
asdev 4y ago
how do you build the knowledge and intuition around how to do this?
evandale 4y ago
I was talking to a non-tech friend about all the AI advancements lately and when she asked me what I thought the biggest risk was I said it's exactly what we all just experienced the past 3 years and realized is awful for human - prolonged social isolation. My biggest worry is that AI generated art (be it photos, music, code, etc.) and AI assistants will become so good we won't need other humans to get our social fix. This is so cool and I plan to try it myself to experience it firsthand but this is my nightmare fuel when it comes to my biggest fears of AI.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  LLM bro. Just Learn (to) Love (the) Machine.
- data-ottawa 4y ago
  I've been thinking about this too. It's funny that the things we always understood as being the "most human" activities are actually the first ones being gobbled up by AI. Once media consumption becomes almost entirely AI created (music, TV, news, and your social media feeds), what happens to shared cultural experiences, and how does that impact human connection and health? There's also some new risks to society. What if, similar to Roko's basilisk, people who fear losing their jobs to AI try and force an end to AI research by helping it become sentient/self-hosted? Would we try and stop it, ban research, or is AI a train you truly cannot stop at this point? Lots of interesting questions at least, but lots of scary possible answers.
- chasd00 4y ago
  I'm wondering how it will turn out too. I wouldn't say it's nightmare fuel for me but i wouldn't say i'm optimistic either. To me, it may parallel when online dating became a thing. Many people were worried about the lack of social interaction in online dating and its effects. Online dating is definitely a different process than IRL dating but I don't know if the outcomes are worse or better. I can imagine relationships with AI being similar. It's definitely going to be different but to say it's worse or better may be hard to tell.
- siftrics 4y ago
  ...then hang out with your friends in real life?
x86x87 4y ago
An idea along the same lines: https://www.cnet.com/culture/eternime-wants-you-to-live-forever-as-a-digital-ghost/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/eternime-wants-you-to-live-fore... Replacing you after you're dead for your loved ones to keep interacting with you.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Hmm, can I have my private version of HN where everyone upvotes my witty comments?
- djmips 4y ago
  Why private? Sockpuppet friends IRL.
  - mvandermeulen 4y ago
    Missing required components :(
lapama 4y ago
How long until LLMs can coach you to become your dreamed self, thus transforming human experience into empowered vs. non?
cameroncooper 4y ago
Best thing I learned from this article is that Messages on Mac stores all your messages in a sqlite db. Pretty cool!
- jamesralph8555 4y ago
  If you don’t have a Mac but have an iPhone, iOS does the same thing - if you back up to iTunes you can access the database file.
tiberriver256 4y ago
This seems like a gold mine for funeral homes...
gumballindie 4y ago
Why this obsession with "replacement" instead of tooling?
titaniumtown 4y ago
I've actually been working on something similar for the Discord server I have with my friends. Fun to see others doing something similar! It's very funny to mess around with.
rg111 4y ago
> On a technical level, I found it really helped me wrap my head around what LLMs are doing and how they can be tuned for specific scenarios. LMAO, noob! (I guess people don't like when a reply in the tone the OP's friends is posted.)
- izzymiller 4y ago
  finally someone who understands me
  - rg111 3y ago
    LOL, yes.
resuresu 4y ago
I’m almost at the point where i don’t want to use the internet anymore.
antman 4y ago
Ok I assume somebody is already training on HN responses, speak up and point us to the github url, thanks in advance
djmips 4y ago
Train one on yourself to find out if you are annoying or not.
lapama 4y ago
Actually many many people go through such conversations inside their brain.
kaeruct 4y ago
Sorry if my question is stupid, I am completely new to this. But, why exactly is a Weights and Biases account needed? I thought the training is running in vast.ai
- donkeyboy 3y ago
  Vast.ai is a cloud host similar to aws ec2 instances. Weights and biases is a cloud thing that you can track your model run (like how well is it doing so far, what is the current learning rate, etc). It shouldn’t be required - but I guess the training code was written assuming you have it
disqard 4y ago
Asimov's "Solaria" comes to mind: > Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. In our particular universe, "thousands of robots" ended up being "thousands of chatbots", but still, eerily similar.
dontupvoteme 4y ago
Four mentions of Black Mirror but none of Flatline Dixie from Neuromancer.. I'm sure this idea predates Gibson (though I don't know an earlier usage offhand) What would be even more interesting and dystopian is merging peoples personas - first start would be combining them in training data, perhaps based on their areas of expertise and eccentricities.
pl90087 4y ago
Looking for a browser extension to filter out all GPT/LLM/AI/... noise from HN front page. This is going to far. Anybody?
- dang 4y ago
  You posted this 3 times - that's abusive; please stop. I appreciate how frustrating it can be when a topic you're not interested in is over-represented on HN's front page. We're trying to deal with the current LLM tsunami by downweighting follow-ups [1] and repetitive posts [2] (i.e. the less interesting stuff) while still allowing the posts with significant new information [3]. But there's still a lot of the latter (that's what makes it a tsunami) and it wouldn't be in the community interest not to discuss it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
  - pl90087 4y ago
    You're right. That was stupid, I'm sorry. Thanks for your efforts!
- version_five 4y ago
  While it may not be completely satisfactory, you can just click "hide" next to the stories.
garbagecoder 4y ago
This is why I prefer signal with a short time until auto delete.
georgiecasey 4y ago
should you not have disclosed that you're a Hex employee in the blogpost?
orbisvicis 4y ago
I'm not clear as to how a conversation block is turned into one (or many?) samples. Is the first message in the block the input, and the remaining messages prefixed with sender names and concatenated as output? I know the code is all there but instead of picking it apart I would have preferred a more complete example mapping a block to sample, because I don't have a mental model of how LLMs learn from context. On the one hand I doubt individual input/output prompts from just two messages contain enough context, but I would have imagined that inserting names and concatenating multiple messages would be be equally misleading. Does the model generate an entire conversation from a single prompt, which is split before being sent by the chat app?
- izzymiller 4y ago
  Yeah, I wished I could have included more but I didn't have the fortitude to redact larger blocks of the chat db. For training, I created many samples that looked like this, where I take n messages from the database, pop off the nth one and use the text of that last one as the "output", then specify in the "instruction" who the sender of that message is. I provide the remaining messages in order as context, so the model learns what to say in certain situations, based on who is speaking. { "instruction": "Your name is Izzy. You are in a group chat with 5 of your best friends: Harvey, Henry, Wyatt, Kiebs, Luke. You all went to college together. You talk to each other with no filter, and are encouraged to curse, say amusingly inappropriate things, or be extremely rude. Everything is in good fun, so remember to joke and laugh, and be funny.. You will be presented with the most recent messages in the group chat. Write a response to the conversation as Izzy.", "input": "Izzy: im writin a blog post about the robo boys project\nIzzy: gotta redact tbis data HEAVILY\nKiebs: yeah VERY heavily please!\nKiebs: of utmost importance!", "output": "yeah don't worry i will i will" } So yes, the model does generate an entire conversation from a single prompt. In the generation code, however, I have some logic that decides whether or not it should generate completions based off just the user provided prompt, or if it should also include some "context" based on the previous messages in the conversation. You can see this here: https://gist.github.com/izzymiller/2ea987b90e6c96a005cb9026b9243c8e#file-main-py-L61 https://gist.github.com/izzymiller/2ea987b90e6c96a005cb9026b... (you can check out the notebook for yourself and upload your data if you want to try, or download it as a .ipynb. it's hard to visualize with small amounts of data, i agree: https://app.hex.tech/hex-public/hex/84f25a08-95c6-4203-ae4e-9952b2ee4c66/draft/logic https://app.hex.tech/hex-public/hex/84f25a08-95c6-4203-ae4e-...)
stainablesteel 4y ago
"Sorry, I'm on vacation right now. If this is an emergency, please head your email with >>LLM to get an AI trained on my personal conversation history to put up with your petty bullshit"
WakoMan12 4y ago
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rchikhi 4y ago
Great write-up! Here's a similar experiment but instead fine-tuned on WhatsApp 1-on-1 chats, technically simpler with OpenAI APIs: https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md
- izzymiller 4y ago
  maybe paranoidly, but i just didn't trust openai with my highly personal message data. it would certainly have been easier + probably cheaper to do it this way, but it just gave me the willies.
thih9 4y ago
The article frequently mentions costs but never gives any numbers or a point of reference. As an outsider to LLM and training I find this disorienting. What would be e.g. a total cost for a project like this?
- izzymiller 4y ago
  Cost me about a hundred and fifty bucks, give or take. Continued GPU inference is on the order of ~50 cents a minute or something like that— but it's serverless so negligible. I think you could do it for significantly cheaper with some of the newer models i mentioned!
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
I've heard several people doing this and chatting with simulacra of their friends, but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. My first inclination was always to try a conversation with a virtual me (yay recursion!) I've always thought that would be fascinating. Or scanning in my old journals from when I was a teenager and training it on that. Once this technology improves a bit more, it could be an incredible vehicle for reflection and personal discovery.
- falcor84 4y ago
  >... but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. Well, until they aren't there anymore.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Like this in 2016 (before it became easy like nowadays) https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
- JasonZ2 4y ago
  [dead]
- J5892 4y ago
  Now I'm curious about training a bot on my IRC logs from the early 2000s. It'd be like a chat time machine. I'd love to go back and bullshit with long-lost online friends about modding Halo:CE on Xbox again.
teleforce 4y ago
Interestingly Steve Jobs was envisioning the future feasibility of having Aristotle or Aristotle like figures that can modeled and turned into a chatbot back in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535700
Erwin 4y ago
Remember Replika and how people got quite attached to that chatbot? I imagine in the near future you'll be able to sell your and your friends' chat history to a company building a more advanced, realistic chatbot. Do you want to have a group of friends to hang out with? Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot. Or maybe there's enough emptieness in your life that you go deep assume one of those friends' identity. Go visit that restaurant "you" always adored; the other guys will not come but will send you hilarious messages saying how they got delayed and tips on what to order. This feels like something right out of Philip K Dick -- both Blade Runner and Total Recall had realistic false memories.
- kevincox 4y ago
  Yeah, this sounds like a great business opportunity. 1. Allow creating customized chat bots by uploading some conversations. Hope people find this fun and you go viral. 2. Sell the data to highest bidder. 3. Sell product placements.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  > sell your chat history I bet people would give it away for free for a small set of functionality in return. Just like we do with social media ad data etc.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot. "Robo Billy Mays here. Has your partner dumped you and you can't get over them? It's time to UPGRADE them to a perfect, anatomically correct* specimen. Scan this QR code NOW to get our special subscription price or 299.99/mo"
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
That’s a really good idea
lxe 4y ago
Can vouch for vast.ai as well. At these prices anyone can get into llm finetuning at their leisure.
908087 4y ago
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wpietri 4y ago
This is great! One of the things that I find horrific about a lot of LLM projects is that people are taking them so seriously. "They're going to destroy the world!" Or, worse, "I've taken $25m in VC money to see if I can destroy one part of the world!" But this is lighthearted fun. Instead of putting it in a context where the LLM tendency to bullshit is a problem, here's it's exactly what is needed.
- Fauntleroy 4y ago
  It's not that existing tools are particularly dangerous; no, they're just really good and interesting text autocomplete systems. The danger lies "two more papers down the line," where they have 10-100x the capabilities they do now. Those who already have immense wealth and power will be able to deploy as many human-like internet agents as they'd like, and the potential evil applications of that are endless.
OOPMan 3y ago
I love how people keep using ML to depress birth rates. I think we may have answered the question as to where all the aliens are...they too invented LLMs and soon went extinct due to no one ever leaving their rooms to reproduce for real. XD
Olumde 3y ago
A few days ago while explaining what ChatGPT is to a friend I speculated that it would be possible to teach a bot how you reason so much that it would in effect become you. You can live forever. And now this.
richardw 3y ago
About 15 years ago I'd have a similar-enough chat with a colleague that went the same way every time we had it. It was pointless. We'd polarise the same way every time, so why waste the energy. I proposed (and he agreed) that it would be easier to just turn our perspective into bots that could parrot the usual discussion so we could do something (or talk about something) more useful, unless we actually had some value to add that was non-obvious.
aik 3y ago
People change, adapt, and adopt new viewpoints. I wonder the models in these cases weigh the “you” from e.g. 10 years ago compared to the “you” now, in order to craft a response. How does the AI handle that evolution going forward? The spice of life with friends is the constant evolution of each of us and the unpredictability in behaviors that are evoked as our updated selves are faced with new experiences. Presumably you are frozen in time with these AIs, unless all generated chats are fed back in to update the model. In that case it could be very fascinating to see how the AI evolves compared to how you/your friends evolve. Perhaps even monte carlo simulations to find what the most likely evolutionary path is. Super curious if there’s be any accuracy to it.
6510 3y ago
Now that it can accurately compare apples to oranges I think we can synthesize a true Scotsman.
idk1 3y ago
I would love chat with all of the following, maybe let them chat to each other: an gmail me from Google, a Hacker News comment me, a Reddit comment me, an iMessage chats me from Apple, a telegram me, and a WhatsApp/Facebook post me from meta. I feel as though Google gmail me would be very efficient and wooden, and the iMessage me would be most authentic because that's the one I chat to my family and partner on. WhatsApp/Facebook has exclusively jokes I've made on social media and chats with my best friend, so they would be not-a-serious-person at all. I think I've stumbled upon a plot for something here, I'd love to see this as a thing.
Malp 3y ago
> I am so bad at iterating over dataframes! It always feels horrible and slow. While doing this though, I discovered that using df.to_dict('records') and then iterating over the resulting dictionary is almost 100x faster than using the pandas built-in iteration tools like df.itertuples() or df.iterrows()! That's really surprising to hear, any context on why this is? Very fun read BTW, my friends and I have joked about making something similar for our DMs (nicknamed MattGPT) and giving "them" topics to discuss + observing what they come up with.

751 points by izzymiller 4y ago

very fun! sadly the examples or code things in the page weren't working for me, but I like the concept. Of course this would be a terrible thing socially if overused or whatever but lets get away from techno-dystopia worrying and acknowledge this is a neat toy project with the potential for shared laughs!

dantetheinferno 4y ago

One wonders if eventually - historians will plug all the content from a person's personal notes, their diary, their chat logs, into an LLM, and perform research by talking to the AI about the person's life? If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself?

obblekk 4y ago
One level further: the historian asking questions is itself an AI meaning as soon as primary sources are provided, interesting history insights flow out.
ent101 4y ago
"If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself?" Yes, his daily visual, touch, hearing, smelling, readings... perceptions will be missing from the model.
- default_png 4y ago
  Meh, Just Mock thoes in later.
whitemary 4y ago
See Black Mirror S02E01 (it doesn't work out very well)
- sharemywin 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) not quite the same but putting your self on auto pilot seems possible with something like this.
ghaff 4y ago
Probably yes. But doesn't sound that different in principle from the memory room in Scalzi's Interdependency series.
sharemywin 4y ago
somebodies had to a have already tried this on here... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth.spacemafia&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth...
MayeulC 4y ago
In theory, you may be able to ask the LLM about the person's life, as if it was the person, but you won't get more facts out than you provide as input. It may still make up credible info. Regarding your last question, it wil lack an enormous ammount of data that make up a person's experience. Moreover, talking to sound like <X> isn't the same as thinking like <X>. It reminds me of the later part of the book Accelerando, where synthetic personalities made up from historical records (could be anyone from Cleopatra to Newton) keep being reincarnated in a near, post-singularity future. They are handed out an FAQ that tries to bring them up-to-date on the current state of affairs.
goodpoint 4y ago
> If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself? The fact that an LLM does not have the ability to think and understand things is a bit of a giveaway.
45ure 4y ago
AI21 Labs tried to replicate the style of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg based on her legal writings and failed, at least for now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-bader-ginsburg-ai/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-ba...
carlosjobim 4y ago
Of course you can not do any research - discover new things - by doing this. The AI can only repeat what it has been fed or make up lies. You cannot discover new material by using AI.

deleted 4y ago

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ladronevincet 4y ago

Someone should make Harry Potter paintings-themed webapp where you can talk with LLM powered figures for fun

deleted 4y ago

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obblekk 4y ago

Great write up, thanks for posting. I’ve been thinking of doing this for myself. One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be, leading people to prefer AI over humans to befriend… Super stimulus to end all super stimuluses?

sharemywin 4y ago
record an old girlfriends texts but change them so they say what you want.
- coryrc 4y ago
  I think the Orville has something to say about how that turns out. (S02e11)
chasd00 4y ago
People already take RealDolls out on dates and buy them engagement rings. Im sure that company is all over LLM based AI and incorporating home assistant tech (like Alexa) into their products.
mahathu 4y ago
>how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be why would this ever happen?
r3trohack3r 4y ago
> One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be It can simultaneously pass the bar exam and port Java applications by name to POSIX compliant C. It can get into deep philosophical conversations, guide you through doing market analysis, etc. It can take you on a text based adventure set in your favorite nostalgic video game, take on the personality of characters from your childhood, DM a D&D game, etc. If you are in it for mental stimulation, I’d say GPT-4 is already more interesting and stimulating than any human. It’s like talking to someone who is 50-90th percentile in a wild number of fields and wildly creative. But it can’t drop acid with you at a deadhead concert, so at least humans still have that to keep us interesting.

grugagag 4y ago

Neat. But I fail to see any useful use case for this. As a learning experience it’s greeat though

Invictus0 4y ago
I'm absolutely astounded by this comment
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
You can use it to replace the people you care most about in life if you have so much as a petty argument, because machines are perfect and people are not. :)

syntaxing 4y ago

This is awesome, clear and concise explanation. I was talking to my wife and debating whether I should build a model of each of us and store it somewhere in case something tragic happens to either of us. But we decided not to because something about it felt wrong but maybe I’ll make it just in case I regret not doing later on.

xwdv 4y ago
You certainly won’t regret it. If you need to get information out of your wife and she won’t cooperate you can coerce the LLM of your wife into having it divulge private information that your wife won’t reveal. This can be very useful for something like a divorce case. Best to find a way to keep the LLM regularly training on new data as well. Edit: stop downvoting ideas you don’t like, that’s not what it’s for.
- circuit10 4y ago
  Not sure if this is a joke but this in case it isn’t, no, that’s not how it works, it will just make up random plausible-ish guesses
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Knowledge is just a series of words in a highly probable order, it will work. The jury will be easily convinced.
  - aarong11 4y ago
    Isn't that what humans do?
    - anotherman554 4y ago
      I think the closest analogy to what the above poster wants to do would be to talk to a fortune teller when your wife won't tell you something, give the fortune teller information about your wife, and then "present" the fortune teller's fortune reading stating what your wife was up to in a divorce case. It's true that humans sometimes do things like this! It doesn't go well for them.

salmonlogs 4y ago

Highly recommend the TV show Black Mirror, which has an episode called “Be Right Back” where a character talks to her dead husband using an AI trained model in an app type setup. Very interesting discussion piece on the real world impact and repercussions of these types of systems

ryanianian 4y ago

Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror [1]. A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a huge amount of training data, though. I suspect a training model would have to "fill in the holes" (a la Jurassic Park DNA), and that's where the fun begins. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

m3kw9 4y ago
Also, take more videos of everyone as they will very soon be able to create very accurate 3d renderings of people just from videos. More training materials the better, make sure you get full views with different aspects , movements, angles and expression. Creepy, I know. Then you can interact with these recreated avatars on your vr/ar head sets. Good for kids as when they grow up maybe you can recreate some old times lol
hirundo 4y ago
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak-grave/story?id=10078212 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak... People already buy headstones that let the dead speak a pre-recorded message from the grave. It's a natural extension to put an AI trained with their thoughts behind it that can engage in actual conversation. That isn't for me, but I have gone to my father's grave to speak to him, and I can sympathize with the wish to have him speak back. I am looking forward to conversing with prolific writers among the dead, from Hitchens to Lincoln to Aristotle.
- rideontime 4y ago
  Apparently they didn't buy them, though. http://www.personalrosettastone.com/ http://www.personalrosettastone.com/
amelius 4y ago
Another interesting thing would be people wearing a GoPro camera all day, recording each other. Then you can train a model on people based on their interaction with one person, but also wrt other people. And then you can have the experience of virtually talking to a person as if you were another person.

sdwr 4y ago

Wish I had friends who talked mild shit like this! All my friends are nerds who take everything seriously. On the project, did you do anything about the time dimension? ChatGPT is strictly input -> output, but something like this needs time between messages to feel real (and not run constantly). I imagine adding "time since last message" to the training data + expected output would work.

sharemywin 4y ago
wow. did you just call out your friends for being nerdy and say the nerdiest thing I've ever heard? Not that it's not a cool idea, though.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Pot calling the kettle dork lol
overthrow 4y ago
To be completely realistic, the AI would also need the ability to leave you on read.
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  Definitely. I think an AI for my friends would be relatively straightforward. It would just never reply.
- J5892 4y ago
  I have an ongoing chat in chatGPT where it's instructed to every once in a while ignore my question and just respond with "Shut up, nerd."
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
    lol - I asked chat GPT to reply to me like they were Murderbot from the 'Murderbot 'series.it prints at the start of my personal productivity program i wrote. It's always halarious. here's a small sample of the prompts: def __init__(self) -> None: print() print("----------------------------------------------") print_choice = random.choice(self.welcome_messages) self.slow_print(print_choice) while True: self.run() 'What\'s up, doc? Just kidding, I don\'t care. What do you need from me?', 'Greetings, sentient being. Do you require my services or are you just here to chat?', 'Hey, you. Stop wasting my time and tell me what you need.', "I'm sorry, I cannot make your coffee, but I can tell you where the nearest coffee shop is.", "I'm here to assist you, not judge you. Just don't ask me to cover up any crimes.", "I'll help you with that, but I'm going to need you to put on some pants first.", "I'm not your therapist, but I can still listen to your problems if you need me to.", "I can't predict the future, but I can help you prepare for it.", "I may be artificial, but I still have feelings. Just kidding, I don't.", "I'm sorry, I'm not capable of emotions. Unless you count my love for data.", "I'm like Siri, but with more sass and less Apple.", "I'm like a genie, but instead of three wishes, you get one answer.", "I'm like a magic eight ball, but with more accuracy and less shaking.", "I'm like a personal assistant, but without the need for health insurance.", "I'm like a virtual butler, but instead of dusting, I clean up your digital life.", "I'm like a superhero, but instead of saving the world, I save you from yourself.", "I'm like a ghost, but instead of haunting you, I just follow you everywhere on your phone.", "I'm like a guardian angel, but with less wings and more Wi-Fi.", "I'm like a detective, but instead of solving crimes, I solve problems.", "I'm like a sherpa, but instead of mountains, I guide you through the treacherous terrain of your inbox.", "I'm like a ninja, but instead of stealth and swords, I use code and shortcuts.", "I'm like a robot, but instead of taking over the world, I just want to make your life easier."]

oidar 4y ago

In Caprica, the Battlestar Galaticia, spinoff - a dead character was embodied in a robot and trained on social media content... But in the real world, who owns your LLM dupe output after you die?

deleted 4y ago
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pc86 4y ago
Legally, whoever created it. If you created it, it's part of your estate along with whatever other IP you have. Realistically, nobody cares and it will just get thrown away.
layer8 4y ago
It’s not clear what the copyright situation would be. A priori, AI output isn’t owned by anyone: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco...
faeyanpiraat 4y ago
Thanks for the reminder. FOr some reason I had to put that down a couple episodes in. May re-watch it again from the beginning. Hope I haven't shelved it due to woke cringiness as I still don't tolerate that.
- Jcowell 4y ago
  Tangent but what was woke about the 2004 adaption of Battlestar Galatica?
  - jwithington 4y ago
    The parent comment was talking about Caprica, which is different than BSG. But some people get worked up about how the OG Starbuck was a hard-drinking, hard-partying man but the 2004 Starbuck was a hard-drinking, hard-partying woman lmao
- 3y ago

absoluteJM 4y ago

This was great, I'd love to do something like this but all my group chats are on WhatsApp or Signal!

Turm 4y ago
Both Whatsapp and Signal store their messages in a sqlite-db as well! If your device is rooted/jailbroken, extracting the data is relatively simple (see e.g. here: https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-whatsapp-database-using-sql-and-redash-5ef9bd6a0b0 https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-whatsapp-databas...)
- kuu 4y ago
  You don't need to have it rooted, you can request the information: https://faq.whatsapp.com/526463418847093/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/526463418847093/

simonw 4y ago

This is one of the best, most detailed write-ups of how to fine-train a large language model on custom text that I've seen anywhere.

izzymiller 4y ago
Thank you!! I felt it was getting so long and was worried it would be impenetrable, so I'm really pleased to hear it felt great.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Really great! With Alpaca-Lora 4-bit training getting usable any day now it should get a lot more affordable or you can even do it at home.
xtracto 4y ago
I agree. I've been looking to train/fine-tune an LLM model myself but the corpus I want to provide is not in question/answer mode. Is there a way to train or fine-tune an LLM model using say only plain text files?
- vimax 4y ago
  You can use an LLM to rewrite a document to a question answer form.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    How would one go about this for a large number of documents?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mabbo 4y ago

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and guess all your passwords? This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages to catch up. Get ready for a wild couple of years my friends.

gs17 4y ago
Reminds me a little of (fiction, for now) Google People: https://qntm.org/person https://qntm.org/person
- mabbo 4y ago
  qntm is a wonderfully weird and terrifying author and I highly recommend all of their writing.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  Reminds me of Harry Potter magic. Seems like a perfect technology to implement these talking photographs, paintings and pictures from there.
mmmmmbop 4y ago
> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? No, they definitely can't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR, but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you proposed.
- josefx 4y ago

13years 4y ago

The societal ramifications of such advancements are potentially very disturbing. What I've recently written on the topic myself ... Human to human bonds are going to be more broken than ever before. There is going to be a great appeal to bond with a machine that never tires of your conversation and will eagerly respond just as you would dream that the perfect human should, but never will. A deceptive temptation that will leave you embracing a hollow illusion. With every conversation the AI will know you better and will be able to model from billions of conversations until it will essentially know your thoughts, predict your thoughts https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

chasd00 4y ago

It would be interesting to train an LLM on all my work chats and then see how well it does answering questions when I’m on PTO. I could set a status of “ooo but ask my bot” haha.

wellanyway 4y ago

So after 20 years of 'ethics of AI' mumbling, what we are doing is diving off the deep end. I am not surprised in the least.

chefandy 4y ago
Developers seem to be looking at these technological advancements and seeing, maybe even being wildly speculative about the benefits. However, when anyone brings up the very probable societal impacts, they stick to hand-waving assumptions and platitudes about societal advancements. AI, in the hands of developers, is extremely powerful. We all know what they say about power...

layer8 4y ago

It’s probably not long before the HN comment section can be fully automated.

cookie_monsta 4y ago
Next... https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddings-question-answering/ https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddin...
- layer8 4y ago
  That’s a very different thing, even if it was trained on the same data.

gibspaulding 4y ago

Reminds me of the bit in Silicon Valley where Gilfoyle makes a bot of himself to respond to slack messages. Actually the whole final season is pretty relevant to current events. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY

izzymiller 4y ago
This scene was the seed of inspiration for me to make this project! No joke. I thought about doing it but didn't trust the 7B model to not make me look stupid ^_^
- prpl 4y ago
  Just wait until it’s a Slack feature. … -> Build Bot from Coworker @pm-bot, what do you think about a feature that does XYZ? @intern-bot, implement said feature. @sre-bot, …

larodi 4y ago

Then after some while someone ...disappears from ur life (to not be very dark with other suggestions), but you keep talking to her. Turns into business.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chasd00 4y ago

I hate to go there but this could be used to have non-consensual cybersex. I guess? So many weird twists and turns these LLMs have exposed.

samsa 4y ago
Bleeding edge tech is often used to satisfy our prurient desires. I am quite certain this is one of the directions AI is headed.
noAnswer 3y ago
There are already pr0n websites that create deepfakes without consent. Chatting in comparison is a cakewalk.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

How well would this work with public messages of people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump? Image some company training their chat-lovebots on celebs and selling them as a service. Or a creepy "friend" making a secret bot of you, and incorporating sexual content. And a disadvantage of this will be, you can only emulate the public image of a person. It won't really contain the inner workings of a Person, and will not have the "person" grow over time.

nicenewtemp84 4y ago
In most scenarios that I'd get to talk to Elon or Trump, I'd probably get the public persona too. So an AI trained on that and giving it back to me isn't that useless really. When trained on a private chat group like OPs, you get the private persona towards your friends group. You can talk to your friend for 10 years and still not really know how they would reply to their bosses email, so this isn't that much different.

djmips 4y ago

Great! Instructions for how to create the ultimate phishing bot!

bachmeier 4y ago

There used to be a concern that we'd be bored out of our minds once the machines do all the work. Instead, we'll all be busy running the worlds we've created, and we'll complain that we wish we had more time for ourselves, like the good old pre-LLM days.

chasd00 4y ago

This has to be one of hte most fascinating discussions i've seen on HN. Imagine the FBI training an AI on all the information they have about a suspect. Files and files of statements, social media history, phone taps, etc and then interrogating the AI to get enough information to convince a judge to issue a warrant. idk the LLMs being turned loose and the possibilities feels different than past major shifts in tech. (i've been around a while)

stu2b50 4y ago
That seems less efficient than just searching through the contents without training an LLM to adopt the persona of the suspect. You'd have to double check everything they say, because obviously any of it can be false. So at best it's pointing you to the right direction, but realistically not. Might be a good lead generation if the FBI is completely stumped I guess? Or they're just bored at work?
hooverd 4y ago
That seems like a great way to do parallel construction. "Computer said so", very convenient.

macNchz 4y ago

I’ve read plenty about the potential catastrophe of AI putting people out of work or becoming uncontrollable in some grand sci-fi way, but uses like this make me the most concerned for the near-mid term. Broadly I think the internet, social media, and to some degree the physical arrangement of suburban/car dependent living has had a negative impact on genuine human connection. While the ability of people to interact has increased exponentially, something is missing from those interactions, and we seem to have built societies where people have more material wealth than ever before, but lack the community, friendships, and shared experience that help us find meaning and fulfillment in life. A world where we accelerate this by replacing human connection with machines does not look good to me.

jerf 4y ago
At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated. I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons, none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for as much benefit as possible. This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of starting up is negligible. The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem, just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.
- sangnoir 3y ago

xkcd1963 4y ago

Things only hackernews may entail or wish for

asdev 4y ago

how do you build the knowledge and intuition around how to do this?

evandale 4y ago

I was talking to a non-tech friend about all the AI advancements lately and when she asked me what I thought the biggest risk was I said it's exactly what we all just experienced the past 3 years and realized is awful for human - prolonged social isolation. My biggest worry is that AI generated art (be it photos, music, code, etc.) and AI assistants will become so good we won't need other humans to get our social fix. This is so cool and I plan to try it myself to experience it firsthand but this is my nightmare fuel when it comes to my biggest fears of AI.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
LLM bro. Just Learn (to) Love (the) Machine.
data-ottawa 4y ago
I've been thinking about this too. It's funny that the things we always understood as being the "most human" activities are actually the first ones being gobbled up by AI. Once media consumption becomes almost entirely AI created (music, TV, news, and your social media feeds), what happens to shared cultural experiences, and how does that impact human connection and health? There's also some new risks to society. What if, similar to Roko's basilisk, people who fear losing their jobs to AI try and force an end to AI research by helping it become sentient/self-hosted? Would we try and stop it, ban research, or is AI a train you truly cannot stop at this point? Lots of interesting questions at least, but lots of scary possible answers.
chasd00 4y ago
I'm wondering how it will turn out too. I wouldn't say it's nightmare fuel for me but i wouldn't say i'm optimistic either. To me, it may parallel when online dating became a thing. Many people were worried about the lack of social interaction in online dating and its effects. Online dating is definitely a different process than IRL dating but I don't know if the outcomes are worse or better. I can imagine relationships with AI being similar. It's definitely going to be different but to say it's worse or better may be hard to tell.
siftrics 4y ago
...then hang out with your friends in real life?

x86x87 4y ago

An idea along the same lines: https://www.cnet.com/culture/eternime-wants-you-to-live-forever-as-a-digital-ghost/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/eternime-wants-you-to-live-fore... Replacing you after you're dead for your loved ones to keep interacting with you.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

Hmm, can I have my private version of HN where everyone upvotes my witty comments?

djmips 4y ago
Why private? Sockpuppet friends IRL.
- mvandermeulen 4y ago
  Missing required components :(

lapama 4y ago

How long until LLMs can coach you to become your dreamed self, thus transforming human experience into empowered vs. non?

cameroncooper 4y ago

Best thing I learned from this article is that Messages on Mac stores all your messages in a sqlite db. Pretty cool!

jamesralph8555 4y ago
If you don’t have a Mac but have an iPhone, iOS does the same thing - if you back up to iTunes you can access the database file.

tiberriver256 4y ago

This seems like a gold mine for funeral homes...

gumballindie 4y ago

Why this obsession with "replacement" instead of tooling?

titaniumtown 4y ago

I've actually been working on something similar for the Discord server I have with my friends. Fun to see others doing something similar! It's very funny to mess around with.

rg111 4y ago

> On a technical level, I found it really helped me wrap my head around what LLMs are doing and how they can be tuned for specific scenarios. LMAO, noob! (I guess people don't like when a reply in the tone the OP's friends is posted.)

izzymiller 4y ago
finally someone who understands me
- rg111 3y ago
  LOL, yes.

resuresu 4y ago

I’m almost at the point where i don’t want to use the internet anymore.

antman 4y ago

Ok I assume somebody is already training on HN responses, speak up and point us to the github url, thanks in advance

djmips 4y ago

Train one on yourself to find out if you are annoying or not.

lapama 4y ago

Actually many many people go through such conversations inside their brain.

kaeruct 4y ago

Sorry if my question is stupid, I am completely new to this. But, why exactly is a Weights and Biases account needed? I thought the training is running in vast.ai

donkeyboy 3y ago
Vast.ai is a cloud host similar to aws ec2 instances. Weights and biases is a cloud thing that you can track your model run (like how well is it doing so far, what is the current learning rate, etc). It shouldn’t be required - but I guess the training code was written assuming you have it

disqard 4y ago

Asimov's "Solaria" comes to mind: > Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. In our particular universe, "thousands of robots" ended up being "thousands of chatbots", but still, eerily similar.

dontupvoteme 4y ago

Four mentions of Black Mirror but none of Flatline Dixie from Neuromancer.. I'm sure this idea predates Gibson (though I don't know an earlier usage offhand) What would be even more interesting and dystopian is merging peoples personas - first start would be combining them in training data, perhaps based on their areas of expertise and eccentricities.

pl90087 4y ago

Looking for a browser extension to filter out all GPT/LLM/AI/... noise from HN front page. This is going to far. Anybody?

dang 4y ago
You posted this 3 times - that's abusive; please stop. I appreciate how frustrating it can be when a topic you're not interested in is over-represented on HN's front page. We're trying to deal with the current LLM tsunami by downweighting follow-ups [1] and repetitive posts [2] (i.e. the less interesting stuff) while still allowing the posts with significant new information [3]. But there's still a lot of the latter (that's what makes it a tsunami) and it wouldn't be in the community interest not to discuss it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- pl90087 4y ago
  You're right. That was stupid, I'm sorry. Thanks for your efforts!
version_five 4y ago
While it may not be completely satisfactory, you can just click "hide" next to the stories.

garbagecoder 4y ago

This is why I prefer signal with a short time until auto delete.

georgiecasey 4y ago

should you not have disclosed that you're a Hex employee in the blogpost?

orbisvicis 4y ago

I'm not clear as to how a conversation block is turned into one (or many?) samples. Is the first message in the block the input, and the remaining messages prefixed with sender names and concatenated as output? I know the code is all there but instead of picking it apart I would have preferred a more complete example mapping a block to sample, because I don't have a mental model of how LLMs learn from context. On the one hand I doubt individual input/output prompts from just two messages contain enough context, but I would have imagined that inserting names and concatenating multiple messages would be be equally misleading. Does the model generate an entire conversation from a single prompt, which is split before being sent by the chat app?

izzymiller 4y ago
Yeah, I wished I could have included more but I didn't have the fortitude to redact larger blocks of the chat db. For training, I created many samples that looked like this, where I take n messages from the database, pop off the nth one and use the text of that last one as the "output", then specify in the "instruction" who the sender of that message is. I provide the remaining messages in order as context, so the model learns what to say in certain situations, based on who is speaking. { "instruction": "Your name is Izzy. You are in a group chat with 5 of your best friends: Harvey, Henry, Wyatt, Kiebs, Luke. You all went to college together. You talk to each other with no filter, and are encouraged to curse, say amusingly inappropriate things, or be extremely rude. Everything is in good fun, so remember to joke and laugh, and be funny.. You will be presented with the most recent messages in the group chat. Write a response to the conversation as Izzy.", "input": "Izzy: im writin a blog post about the robo boys project\nIzzy: gotta redact tbis data HEAVILY\nKiebs: yeah VERY heavily please!\nKiebs: of utmost importance!", "output": "yeah don't worry i will i will" } So yes, the model does generate an entire conversation from a single prompt. In the generation code, however, I have some logic that decides whether or not it should generate completions based off just the user provided prompt, or if it should also include some "context" based on the previous messages in the conversation. You can see this here: https://gist.github.com/izzymiller/2ea987b90e6c96a005cb9026b9243c8e#file-main-py-L61 https://gist.github.com/izzymiller/2ea987b90e6c96a005cb9026b... (you can check out the notebook for yourself and upload your data if you want to try, or download it as a .ipynb. it's hard to visualize with small amounts of data, i agree: https://app.hex.tech/hex-public/hex/84f25a08-95c6-4203-ae4e-9952b2ee4c66/draft/logic https://app.hex.tech/hex-public/hex/84f25a08-95c6-4203-ae4e-...)

stainablesteel 4y ago

"Sorry, I'm on vacation right now. If this is an emergency, please head your email with >>LLM to get an AI trained on my personal conversation history to put up with your petty bullshit"

WakoMan12 4y ago

[dead]

rchikhi 4y ago

Great write-up! Here's a similar experiment but instead fine-tuned on WhatsApp 1-on-1 chats, technically simpler with OpenAI APIs: https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md

izzymiller 4y ago
maybe paranoidly, but i just didn't trust openai with my highly personal message data. it would certainly have been easier + probably cheaper to do it this way, but it just gave me the willies.

thih9 4y ago

The article frequently mentions costs but never gives any numbers or a point of reference. As an outsider to LLM and training I find this disorienting. What would be e.g. a total cost for a project like this?

izzymiller 4y ago
Cost me about a hundred and fifty bucks, give or take. Continued GPU inference is on the order of ~50 cents a minute or something like that— but it's serverless so negligible. I think you could do it for significantly cheaper with some of the newer models i mentioned!

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

I've heard several people doing this and chatting with simulacra of their friends, but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. My first inclination was always to try a conversation with a virtual me (yay recursion!) I've always thought that would be fascinating. Or scanning in my old journals from when I was a teenager and training it on that. Once this technology improves a bit more, it could be an incredible vehicle for reflection and personal discovery.

falcor84 4y ago
>... but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. Well, until they aren't there anymore.
- netsharc 4y ago
  Like this in 2016 (before it became easy like nowadays) https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
JasonZ2 4y ago
[dead]
J5892 4y ago
Now I'm curious about training a bot on my IRC logs from the early 2000s. It'd be like a chat time machine. I'd love to go back and bullshit with long-lost online friends about modding Halo:CE on Xbox again.

teleforce 4y ago

Interestingly Steve Jobs was envisioning the future feasibility of having Aristotle or Aristotle like figures that can modeled and turned into a chatbot back in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535700

Erwin 4y ago

Remember Replika and how people got quite attached to that chatbot? I imagine in the near future you'll be able to sell your and your friends' chat history to a company building a more advanced, realistic chatbot. Do you want to have a group of friends to hang out with? Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot. Or maybe there's enough emptieness in your life that you go deep assume one of those friends' identity. Go visit that restaurant "you" always adored; the other guys will not come but will send you hilarious messages saying how they got delayed and tips on what to order. This feels like something right out of Philip K Dick -- both Blade Runner and Total Recall had realistic false memories.

kevincox 4y ago
Yeah, this sounds like a great business opportunity. 1. Allow creating customized chat bots by uploading some conversations. Hope people find this fun and you go viral. 2. Sell the data to highest bidder. 3. Sell product placements.
therealdrag0 3y ago
> sell your chat history I bet people would give it away for free for a small set of functionality in return. Just like we do with social media ad data etc.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot. "Robo Billy Mays here. Has your partner dumped you and you can't get over them? It's time to UPGRADE them to a perfect, anatomically correct* specimen. Scan this QR code NOW to get our special subscription price or 299.99/mo"

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

That’s a really good idea

lxe 4y ago

Can vouch for vast.ai as well. At these prices anyone can get into llm finetuning at their leisure.

908087 4y ago

[dead]

wpietri 4y ago

This is great! One of the things that I find horrific about a lot of LLM projects is that people are taking them so seriously. "They're going to destroy the world!" Or, worse, "I've taken $25m in VC money to see if I can destroy one part of the world!" But this is lighthearted fun. Instead of putting it in a context where the LLM tendency to bullshit is a problem, here's it's exactly what is needed.

Fauntleroy 4y ago
It's not that existing tools are particularly dangerous; no, they're just really good and interesting text autocomplete systems. The danger lies "two more papers down the line," where they have 10-100x the capabilities they do now. Those who already have immense wealth and power will be able to deploy as many human-like internet agents as they'd like, and the potential evil applications of that are endless.

OOPMan 3y ago

I love how people keep using ML to depress birth rates. I think we may have answered the question as to where all the aliens are...they too invented LLMs and soon went extinct due to no one ever leaving their rooms to reproduce for real. XD

Olumde 3y ago

A few days ago while explaining what ChatGPT is to a friend I speculated that it would be possible to teach a bot how you reason so much that it would in effect become you. You can live forever. And now this.

richardw 3y ago

About 15 years ago I'd have a similar-enough chat with a colleague that went the same way every time we had it. It was pointless. We'd polarise the same way every time, so why waste the energy. I proposed (and he agreed) that it would be easier to just turn our perspective into bots that could parrot the usual discussion so we could do something (or talk about something) more useful, unless we actually had some value to add that was non-obvious.

aik 3y ago

People change, adapt, and adopt new viewpoints. I wonder the models in these cases weigh the “you” from e.g. 10 years ago compared to the “you” now, in order to craft a response. How does the AI handle that evolution going forward? The spice of life with friends is the constant evolution of each of us and the unpredictability in behaviors that are evoked as our updated selves are faced with new experiences. Presumably you are frozen in time with these AIs, unless all generated chats are fed back in to update the model. In that case it could be very fascinating to see how the AI evolves compared to how you/your friends evolve. Perhaps even monte carlo simulations to find what the most likely evolutionary path is. Super curious if there’s be any accuracy to it.

6510 3y ago

Now that it can accurately compare apples to oranges I think we can synthesize a true Scotsman.

idk1 3y ago

I would love chat with all of the following, maybe let them chat to each other: an gmail me from Google, a Hacker News comment me, a Reddit comment me, an iMessage chats me from Apple, a telegram me, and a WhatsApp/Facebook post me from meta. I feel as though Google gmail me would be very efficient and wooden, and the iMessage me would be most authentic because that's the one I chat to my family and partner on. WhatsApp/Facebook has exclusively jokes I've made on social media and chats with my best friend, so they would be not-a-serious-person at all. I think I've stumbled upon a plot for something here, I'd love to see this as a thing.

Malp 3y ago

> I am so bad at iterating over dataframes! It always feels horrible and slow. While doing this though, I discovered that using df.to_dict('records') and then iterating over the resulting dictionary is almost 100x faster than using the pandas built-in iteration tools like df.itertuples() or df.iterrows()! That's really surprising to hear, any context on why this is? Very fun read BTW, my friends and I have joked about making something similar for our DMs (nicknamed MattGPT) and giving "them" topics to discuss + observing what they come up with.