4 ms·
>Write a sentence that contains only 5-letter words. >Silly jokes told with mirth bring mirthful grins. Why does Chatgpt fail so hard at what ought to be a si
by hammock 3y ago
>Write a sentence that contains only 5-letter words.
>Silly jokes told with mirth bring mirthful grins.
Why does Chatgpt fail so hard at what ought to be a simple task? This example is not the first time I’ve seen a fail involving basic word/letter/sentence counting
- noman-land 3y agoIt cannot count and does not know what numbers are.
- electroly 3y agoI am just guessing here, but internally ChatGPT doesn't see words, it sees numeric tokens which were generated from the text by a tokenizer, right? I don't think it has a way to "see" the letters except by being trained on a corpus that refers to the letters in a word.
- NhanH 3y agoChatGPT works at the token level (a sequence of characters), it doesn’t know what a letter is.
- williamdclt 3y agoThat’s too simplistic an answer: why is the chatgpt response _mostly_ correct then?
- jstanley 3y agoBecause those tokens appear in lists of 5-letter words.
- paraboul 3y agoBecause language models don't work as you might expect. It might be a simple task for deterministic algorithm, not so much for language based inference model. There are no hard coded rules for specific requests
- iinnPP 3y agoI have wondered this as well. I also wonder how sometimes when pointed to math fails, it proceeds to get the correct answer. Typically with simple division that results in many decimals with specific rounding instructions. It will get it very wrong, be prompted that it was wrong, then spit out the correct answer but often with the incorrect amount of decimals. Specifically problems like 7438.474782382 / 43.577874722 Getting it right is the weird part for me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- exitb 3y ago“Write a sentence that contains only 5-letter words. Avoid other words at all costs.” Now it’s always correct. Prompt engineering™
- lelandfe 3y agoYou’re probably joking, but this still fails. I don’t think anyone has cracked how to get ChatGPT to play well with numbers yet. First output for the curious: > The foggy moon glows softly over the hills.
- exitb 3y agoThe “always” is probably an exaggeration, but the original prompt failed for me every time, while the stricter version succeed in all of my 5 attempts. I’m using GPT4 via the official ChatGPT UI to be specific. "Every snake likes quick brown jumps." "Every great dream needs brave heart." "Every night Brian reads about space." "Every house holds sweet music tones." "Every swine likes sweet green grass."
- gabrielsroka 3y agoReminds me of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_-AfhLQfb6w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_-AfhLQfb6w
- rishav_sharan 3y agoAnd this is why an AI prompter is actually becoming a real job
- ogogmad 3y agoGPT-4's response: "Every night, James reads three short books." It's correct.
- misnome 3y agoI mean, yes, if you keep asking it in different ways until you get the right answer and then stop, Clever Hans can count.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonahx 3y agoThe difference is GPT4. Unfortunately these were run on 3.5. I asked GPT4 the question verbatim, just one time, and like the grandparent got: "Every night Linda reads short books about space."
- Sharlin 3y agoI precommitted to taking exactly ten samples and GPT-4 gave a correct answer eight times. I then precommitted to taking ten more, and it nailed every one, bringing the success rate to 90%. The two failures had a single six-letter word but were otherwise correct. Skepticism is fine, but being skeptical out of mere ignorance of what these things can do is not.
- netruk44 3y agoJust to follow on from what some others are saying, it may be because of tokens. These are the 'words' it sees in the poem: https://i.imgur.com/EzffHiZ.png https://i.imgur.com/EzffHiZ.png To be able to answer the question correctly, it essentially needs to memorize how long each of the tokens in its vocabulary are. One token seems to range from 1 character to 5 characters normally, but I'm sure some longer tokens exist, too. Judging by how often it fails at tasks like this, it seems likely that the model isn't aware and is just blindly guessing (as it always does).
- Chinjut 3y agoWhy are those the token boundaries? "mirth" decomposes as "m" + "irth"? "grins" decomposes as "gr" + "ins"?
- cultureswitch 3y agoOne of the reasons is because to ChatGPT, each word is a token. It only knows how many letters are in a word because it has been trained to know that about each word individually.
- rvnx 3y agoYou can see it by yourself here if you are interested: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer The tokens are usually not matching the length of a word
- neom 3y agoMaybe it's a GPT3 thing? I asked GPT4 and it gave me: "Every apple makes crisp sweet juice."
- gwern 3y agohttps://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes is a big part of it and always has been (but note this should only apply to letters/words/phonetics, and the sentence issues should be something else).
- hammock 3y agoThanks for linking that explanation. Everyone has been saying “tokens” which I get but before your comment, the missing piece for me was that these tokens are of arbitrary (and suboptimally long) length as a tradeoff for performance