6 ms·

To answer your question. Of course I have been in those situations. But nobody has ever tried to deceive me nor have I tried. I wonder what kind of software int

To answer your question. Of course I have been in those situations. But nobody has ever tried to deceive me nor have I tried. I wonder what kind of software interviews you have been in? If somebody confuses functions from different languages or frameworks, that's of course something that I wouldn't count as cheating. That's just a mistake and of course that happens regularly. But in those cases the functions did actually exist somewhere and weren't completely made up. Regarding my prior comment: The difference obviously is that in humans this is intentional behavior unless the human is not in a healthy state memory-wise. Hence my initial comment about being deceptive. We usually know when we don't know something for sure. LLMs do not. At least not yet. If the question is whether LLMs have an understanding of their output, then my argument just states that the fact that they obviously aren't trained to deceive and still emit this kind of output likely means that they don't have a complete understanding of what they generate. As far as I understand the issue, this has nothing to do with the training. It's a general problem with the transformer architecture that there is no way to estimate the confidence of the output. Correct me if I am wrong here, I am not an expert on transformers. Just trying to wrap my head around this stuff.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> The difference is that in humans this is intentional behavior unless the human is not in a healthy state memory-wise. Hence my initial comment about being deceptive. We usually know when we don't know something for sure. My personal experience with my own thought process is that my un/sub-conscious generates thoughts I have to filter for accuracy and/or "send back" for reprocessing - this is a mostly conscious activity. My raw thought stream is about as good as LLM output - sounds right, but it's often full of nonsense. That's why I tend to say LLM output is akin to that unfiltered inner voice output. My experience with other people is that plenty of them - arguably more than 50% I met in physical space and talked with at length - care little about being accurate. They don't track provenance of their information. They uncritically believe whatever bullshit they read in lifestyle publications on-line. They say things confidently that they never thought much about, and have no first clue if it's actually true or not. Very much like LLMs - there's a whole class of topics where I know to assume the interlocutor is most likely "hallucinating" things. Also, fight-or-flight reaction may make you switch into full-on bullshitting mode, without it being intentional. > they obviously aren't trained to deceive and still emit this kind of output likely means that they don't have a complete understanding of what they generate And my argument is that this is the same thing a person's inner voice does. Deep understanding of a topic may make your inner voice output you more of the correct associations, but ultimately, most of the time, people have to have a back-and-forth with themselves in their own head to then say/write/do something correctly. With more complex (or less understood) tasks, this involves consciously performing an explicit step-by-step algorithm you track in your mind (and checklists in aviation and medicine are further externalization of that idea - to protect against you misremembering (or "hallucinating") the steps). > It's a general problem with the transformer architecture that there is no way to estimate the confidence of the output. The output contains probability factors for predicted tokens, but chat interface doesn't expose it, and doesn't make a good use of it.
- starbugs 3y ago
  > My experience with other people is that plenty of them - arguably more than 50% I met in physical space and talked with at length - care little about being accurate. They don't track provenance of their information. They uncritically believe whatever bullshit they read in lifestyle publications on-line. They say things confidently that they never thought much about, and have no first clue if it's actually true or not. Very much like LLMs - there's a whole class of topics where I know to assume the interlocutor is most likely "hallucinating" things. There is a key difference between making up new facts and copying 'bullshit' picked up somewhere else. I agree that more than 50% of people don't put much effort into the accuracy of the material they recite, but that's not my point. My point is that LLMs obviously seem to make up completely new entities in generated code that do not have any merit in reality. I agree with the description of your inner voice process, but does your inner voice produce new function or enum value names that you need to filter? Mine certainly does not. Does it generate non-sense that needs serious revision and filtering in general? Of course. But not in the style of new facts, just thoughts that could make sense in some simplified form of reality, but need revision or filtering to match the actual real world.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > I agree with the description of your inner voice process, but does your inner voice produce new function or enum value names that you need to filter? Yes! Very often. That's because it's exactly "thoughts that could make sense in some simplified form of reality, but need revision or filtering to match the actual real world". In my actual code writing practice, I've spotted this manifesting in several ways. One, my subconscious often autocompletes some function name that it feels should be there (or would be nice to have it), which is immediately checked by the actual autocomplete of the IDE. Could be something like: str.cou <-- oh, there's no count() str.size() <-- there we go! Or: str.split <-- ?!? ah, it's C++, std::string does not have a split() method. Same with enum values, and many other things. If I pay attention, I can observe my mind producing these kinds of completions, which are often immediately shot down by some other process (involving memory?), by looking at the typed out thing and feeling it's wrong, or worst case, by the IDE or the compiler. Another case is when I write new code and I know functions don't exist - I just write what my stream of thoughts provide, and either clean it out later, or actually implement the functions that it "hallucinated".
concordDance 3y ago
> The difference obviously is that in humans this is intentional behavior unless the human is not in a healthy state memory-wise. This has not been my experience. Once you get out of the tech bubble you will frequently find people who genuinely treat talking as just pattern matching and signalling and speak words that don't correspond to any actual internal model of how the world works.
- starbugs 3y ago
  I am frequently talking to people outside the tech bubble. Could you give me an example? And maybe a hint how this would relate to my argument about intention and understanding? I have a hard time following your argument.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Tell your family and friends you, e.g., like regularly having a pizza for dinner, or that you're ditching sugar for artificial sweetener - and enjoy watching people on an acid trip with no LSD. You'll hear plenty of warnings warning and advice that's quite obviously bullshit, and which they acquired from other people and/or lifestyle magazines/blogs/memes - except they don't even realize it, because they're not in a habit of remembering where did the idea come from along with the idea itself, and so instead they "just know" they're right.
    - starbugs 3y ago
      Again, my point is not about people (maybe wrongly) reciting sentences that they have picked up somewhere without any attempt at verification or understanding of the matter. My point is making up entire new entities (function names) that don't exist at all and claiming these things as facts in a very self-confident tone. While mindlessly reciting "facts" that you have picked up somewhere as a conversational style doesn't require any understanding (it's called belief), making up entities demonstrates that you do something that requires a real understanding, but you don't have that understanding. You just somewhat carefully arrange words based on statistics to match a query. I've yet to find a human who does this. Even my uncle who fits your description more than perfectly wouldn't do this. And I've never met anyone who is mentally healthy and sober doing this.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> The difference is that in humans this is intentional behavior unless the human is not in a healthy state memory-wise. Hence my initial comment about being deceptive. We usually know when we don't know something for sure. My personal experience with my own thought process is that my un/sub-conscious generates thoughts I have to filter for accuracy and/or "send back" for reprocessing - this is a mostly conscious activity. My raw thought stream is about as good as LLM output - sounds right, but it's often full of nonsense. That's why I tend to say LLM output is akin to that unfiltered inner voice output. My experience with other people is that plenty of them - arguably more than 50% I met in physical space and talked with at length - care little about being accurate. They don't track provenance of their information. They uncritically believe whatever bullshit they read in lifestyle publications on-line. They say things confidently that they never thought much about, and have no first clue if it's actually true or not. Very much like LLMs - there's a whole class of topics where I know to assume the interlocutor is most likely "hallucinating" things. Also, fight-or-flight reaction may make you switch into full-on bullshitting mode, without it being intentional. > they obviously aren't trained to deceive and still emit this kind of output likely means that they don't have a complete understanding of what they generate And my argument is that this is the same thing a person's inner voice does. Deep understanding of a topic may make your inner voice output you more of the correct associations, but ultimately, most of the time, people have to have a back-and-forth with themselves in their own head to then say/write/do something correctly. With more complex (or less understood) tasks, this involves consciously performing an explicit step-by-step algorithm you track in your mind (and checklists in aviation and medicine are further externalization of that idea - to protect against you misremembering (or "hallucinating") the steps). > It's a general problem with the transformer architecture that there is no way to estimate the confidence of the output. The output contains probability factors for predicted tokens, but chat interface doesn't expose it, and doesn't make a good use of it.

starbugs 3y ago
> My experience with other people is that plenty of them - arguably more than 50% I met in physical space and talked with at length - care little about being accurate. They don't track provenance of their information. They uncritically believe whatever bullshit they read in lifestyle publications on-line. They say things confidently that they never thought much about, and have no first clue if it's actually true or not. Very much like LLMs - there's a whole class of topics where I know to assume the interlocutor is most likely "hallucinating" things. There is a key difference between making up new facts and copying 'bullshit' picked up somewhere else. I agree that more than 50% of people don't put much effort into the accuracy of the material they recite, but that's not my point. My point is that LLMs obviously seem to make up completely new entities in generated code that do not have any merit in reality. I agree with the description of your inner voice process, but does your inner voice produce new function or enum value names that you need to filter? Mine certainly does not. Does it generate non-sense that needs serious revision and filtering in general? Of course. But not in the style of new facts, just thoughts that could make sense in some simplified form of reality, but need revision or filtering to match the actual real world.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > I agree with the description of your inner voice process, but does your inner voice produce new function or enum value names that you need to filter? Yes! Very often. That's because it's exactly "thoughts that could make sense in some simplified form of reality, but need revision or filtering to match the actual real world". In my actual code writing practice, I've spotted this manifesting in several ways. One, my subconscious often autocompletes some function name that it feels should be there (or would be nice to have it), which is immediately checked by the actual autocomplete of the IDE. Could be something like: str.cou <-- oh, there's no count() str.size() <-- there we go! Or: str.split <-- ?!? ah, it's C++, std::string does not have a split() method. Same with enum values, and many other things. If I pay attention, I can observe my mind producing these kinds of completions, which are often immediately shot down by some other process (involving memory?), by looking at the typed out thing and feeling it's wrong, or worst case, by the IDE or the compiler. Another case is when I write new code and I know functions don't exist - I just write what my stream of thoughts provide, and either clean it out later, or actually implement the functions that it "hallucinated".

concordDance 3y ago

> The difference obviously is that in humans this is intentional behavior unless the human is not in a healthy state memory-wise. This has not been my experience. Once you get out of the tech bubble you will frequently find people who genuinely treat talking as just pattern matching and signalling and speak words that don't correspond to any actual internal model of how the world works.

starbugs 3y ago
I am frequently talking to people outside the tech bubble. Could you give me an example? And maybe a hint how this would relate to my argument about intention and understanding? I have a hard time following your argument.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Tell your family and friends you, e.g., like regularly having a pizza for dinner, or that you're ditching sugar for artificial sweetener - and enjoy watching people on an acid trip with no LSD. You'll hear plenty of warnings warning and advice that's quite obviously bullshit, and which they acquired from other people and/or lifestyle magazines/blogs/memes - except they don't even realize it, because they're not in a habit of remembering where did the idea come from along with the idea itself, and so instead they "just know" they're right.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    Again, my point is not about people (maybe wrongly) reciting sentences that they have picked up somewhere without any attempt at verification or understanding of the matter. My point is making up entire new entities (function names) that don't exist at all and claiming these things as facts in a very self-confident tone. While mindlessly reciting "facts" that you have picked up somewhere as a conversational style doesn't require any understanding (it's called belief), making up entities demonstrates that you do something that requires a real understanding, but you don't have that understanding. You just somewhat carefully arrange words based on statistics to match a query. I've yet to find a human who does this. Even my uncle who fits your description more than perfectly wouldn't do this. And I've never met anyone who is mentally healthy and sober doing this.