6 ms·
Poor comparison
by muh_gradle 3y ago
Poor comparison
- dcow 3y agoNo so! Either both the comments are meaningful, or both are meaningless.
- jchw 3y agoI don't understand why that is necessarily true.
- dcow 3y agoBecause they are both statements about the future. Either humans can inductively reason about future events in a meaningful way, or they can’t. So both statements are equally meaningful in a logical sense. (Hume) Models have been improving. By induction they’ll continue until we see them stop. There is no prevailing understanding of models that lets us predict a parameter and/or training set size after which they’ll plateau. So arguing “how do we know they’ll get better” is the same as arguing “how do we know the sun will rise tomorrow”… We don’t, technically, but experience shows it’s the likely outcome.
- jchw 3y agoIt's comparing the outcome that a thing that has never happened before will (no specified time frame), versus the outcome that a thing that has happened billions of times will suddenly not happen (tomorrow). The interesting thing is, we know for sure the sun will eventually die. We do not know at all that LLMs will ever stop hallucinating to a meaningful degree. It could very well be that the paradigm of LLMs just isn't enough.
- dcow 3y agoWhat? LLMs have been improving for years and years as we’ve been researching and iterating on them. “Obviously they’ll improve” does not require “solving the hallucination problem”. Humans hallucinate too, and we’re deemed good enough.
- jdiff 3y agoHumans hallucinate far less readily than any LLM. And "years and years" of improvement have made no change whatsoever to their hallucinatory habits. Inductively, I see no reason to believe why years and years of further improvements would make a dent in LLM hallucination, either.
- ripe 3y agoAs my boss used to say, "well, now you're being logical." The LLM true believers have decided that (a) hallucinations will eventually go away as these models improve, it's just a matter of time; and (b) people who complain about hallucinations are setting the bar too high and ignoring the fact that humans themselves hallucinate too, so their complaints are not to be taken seriously. In other words, logic is not going to win this argument. I don't know what will.
- dcow 3y agoI don’t know if it’s my fault or what but my “LLMs will obviously improve” comment is specifically not “llms will stop hallucinating”. I hate the AI fad (or maybe more annoyed with it) but I’ve seen enough to know these things are powerful and going to get better with all the money people are throwing at them. I mean you’d have to be willfully ignoring reality recently to not have been exposed to this stuff. What I think is actually happening is that some people innately have taken the stance that it’s impossible for an AI model to be useful if it ever hallucinates, and they probably always will hallucinate to some degree or under some conditions, ergo they will never be useful. End of story. I agree it’s stupid to try and inductively reason that AI models will stop hallucinating, but that was never actually my argument.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Humans hallucinate far less readily than any LLM. This is because “hallucinate” means very different things in the human and LLM context. Humans have false/inaccurate memories all the time, and those are closer to what LLM “hallucination” represents than humam hallucinations are.
- seanhunter 3y agoJust because you can inductively reason about one thing doesn't mean you can inductively reason about all things. In particular you absolutely can't just continue to extrapolate short-term phenomena out blindly into the future and pretend that has the same level of meaning as things like the sun rising which are the result of fundamental mechanisms that have been observed, explored and understood iteratively better and better over an extremely long time.
- zdragnar 3y agoWell, based on observations we know that the sun doesn't rise or set; the earth turns, and gravity and our position on the surface create the impression that the sun moves. There are two things that might change- the sun stops shining, or the earth stops moving. Of the known possible ways for either of those things to happen, we can fairly conclusively say neither will be an issue in our lifetimes. An asteroid coming out of the darkness of space and blowing a hole in the surface of the earth, kicking up such a dust cloud that we don't see the sun for years is a far more likely, if still statically improbable, scenario. LLMs, by design, create combinations of characters that are disconnected from the concept of True, False, Right or Wrong.
- pixl97 3y agoIs the function of human intelligence connected to true false right or wrong? These things are 'programmed' into you after you are born and from systematic steps.
- zdragnar 3y agoYes, actually. People may disagree on how to categorize things, but we are innately wired to develop these concepts. Erikson and Piaget are two examples of theorists in the field of child psychology who developed formalizations for emotional and mental stages of development. Understanding that a thing "is" is central to these developmental stages. A more classic example is Freud's deliniation between the id, ego and super-ego. Only the last is built upon imparted cultural mores; the id and ego are purely internal things. Disorders within the ego (excessive defense mechanisms) inhibit perception of what is true and false. Chatbots / llms don't consider any of these things; they consider only what is the most likely response to a given input?. The result may, by coincidence, happen to be true.
- seanhunter 3y agoAbsolutely not. One thing happens because of a set of physical laws that govern the universe. These laws were discovered due to a massive number of observations of multiple phenomena by a huge number of individuals over (literally) thousands of years, leading to a standard model that is broadly comprehensive and extremely robust in its predictions of millions or possibly even billions of seperate events daily. The other thing we have a small number of observations of happening over the last 50 or 60 years but mostly the last 5 years or so. We know some of the mathematical features of the phenomena we are observing but not all and there is a great deal going on that we don't understand (emergence in particular). The things we are seeing contradict most of the academic field of linquistics so we don't have a theoretical basis for them either outside of the maths. The maths (linear algebra) we understand well, but we don't really understand why this particular formulation works so well on language related problems. Probably the models will improve but we can't naively assume this will just continue. One very strong result we have seen time and time again is that there seems to be an exponential relationship between computation and trainingset size required and capability. So for every delta x increase we want in capability, we seem to pay (at least) x^n (n>1) in computation and training required. That says at some point increases in capability become infeasible unless much better architectures are discovered. It's not clear where that inflection point is.