3 ms·

> asking the LLM to do an operation with text it is not capable of So you are saying the LLM isn't making world models? Because if it did it would understand t

> asking the LLM to do an operation with text it is not capable of So you are saying the LLM isn't making world models? Because if it did it would understand the properties of these words, this is one of the easiest relationships it could find. It isn't fed these properties directly, but it knows the letters that each word is made up of anyway which is how it can turn them to Base64 etc, there is no reason at all why it shouldn't be able to solve that problem. But if you are right and this sort of thing is impossible, that implies that the LLM can't model anything at all, its just a stupid text generator. Is that what you meant?

astrange 3y ago
There's no such thing as a world model. People don't solve problems by creating world models. That term was invented by 70s AI researchers, but remember that those people failed. Their research wasn't actually correct, so you shouldn't reuse it.
wilg 3y ago
No. We know that LLMs make world models. (Often literally: https://twitter.com/wesg52/status/1709551516577902782 https://twitter.com/wesg52/status/1709551516577902782). I should also point out that your tone is aggressive, so it makes me think you're not interested in learning. But I'm going to proceed anyway. It cannot understand these properties of words well because it does not operate on words, it operates on tokens. You can see examples here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears inside the token, because it does not ever receive that information. The only way it could get that information is if the training data explicitly attempted to work around this limitation. But I would also appreciate insight from someone with a deeper understanding of the internals of these big LLMs.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > I should also point out that your tone is aggressive, so it makes me think you're not interested in learning Why do you think that? Aggressiveness is the best way to get responses, people don't like it but it makes people respond to you. And for that matter I have a pretty good understanding about this topic, it is kind of annoying when people try to school you then. The "it gets tokenized data" is just a cop out response by people who don't understand the problem. > It cannot understand these properties of words without them being in the training data because it does not operate on words, it operates on tokens But those properties are in the training data. We know the LLM can answer these sort of questions when asked directly for simpler cases. But when asked to do something that requires it to draw from many different parts it fails. It didn't fail due to the data not being there, it failed due to not understanding that it should use that data. > This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears _inside the token_, because _it does not ever receive that information_ Right, the structure of LLM makes these sort of questions harder for it. But they aren't impossible or unfair, nothing prevents an LLM model from solving this sort of question. The main reason it fails is that it tries to write it like a human would, as it isn't trained to solve problems it is trained to mimic humans, it is too dumb to figure out ways to solve it on its own. And to show you I understand how these models works, the most efficient way to solve this question would be to solve it like a human. If it wrote out the steps "try next word as 'Blah'" and then verify those words one at a time, likely it would succeed. And since we know LLMs work like that we could try to make it output the results in that way, and that would improve performance. However, a smart agent would understand that its answer was wrong in that case by itself, and change its answering style on its own to fit the problem. But it can't think like that, it just tries to write it like answers it has seen, it doesn't do any verification since the answers it saw didn't verify, it doesn't spell things out here since the answers it saw didn't spell things out etc.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I’m not interested in continuing to talk to you.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      If you don't want to talk more stop posting instead of posting that you want to stop posting. If everyone who wanted to stop posting posted that they want to stop posting it would clutter the board too much.
      - wilg 3y ago
        Let me be clearer, you’re frustrating to engage with on this topic, which you should reconsider. And other posters should consider avoiding engaging with you on this.
        Jensson 3y ago
        Well, I am trying to explain why your original meme post "it just reads tokens, it can't do that" is wrong. That meme is tiring, and the most tiring with trying to fight such memes is that so many comes and repeats it and it is very hard to change their mind. But yeah, I should have been more clear to target that meme so that you didn't feel it was about you. It is easy to accidentally make things a bit too personal.
        wilg 3y ago
        OK, thanks. I'm not claiming its impossible for an LLM to learn this, just that it appears to be much harder (perhaps by requiring more data) when the task involves fighting against tokenization. For example, it can base64 encode your phrase "What was once dormant may soon angrily awake" correctly, and it can reverse the letters correctly. But it fails to do the same on the example text from the OpenAI tokenizer.
- telotortium 3y ago
  > This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears inside the token, because it does not ever receive that information. More difficult, but it shouldn't be impossible. The Chinese managed to make rhyming dictionaries over 1000 years ago despite using a non-phonetic writing system. More relevantly, GPT-4 has definitely ingested both regular and rhyming dictionaries.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I agree it should be possible.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Possible, certainly, but given the difficulties it has with it, it appears it likely requires more training. Unlike with Chinese, the LLMs will not benefit from extensive training data mapping its tokens to and from sounds or rhyming with other words, but need to derive during training from data that rarely mentions these tokens at all.
- maxdoop 3y ago
  What does it mean to understand?
grumbel 3y ago
Asking an LLM about letters is like asking a human about the individual wavelength that make up color. They might be able to infer it from text they read, but their sensory system is simply incapable of detecting any of that directly.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Not comparable at all, humans cant determine wavelength by sight since it isn't a perfect representation of the data. LLMs however can determine the letters based on its tokens, since those tokens are a perfect representation of the data. We already know they can do this, just ask it to translate to Base64 or something similar, it knows perfectly well what letters the words are made up of.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    LLMs need to learn those mappings, because they're not inherent in the tokens, the same way humans need to learn mappings from colours to wavelengths. That one is not a perfect one to one representation of the data is entirely irrelevant. That they can learn it in a given context does not mean they have learnt every relationship the same way humans miss all kinds of relationships as well without being pointed right at them. There's no doubt that LLMs are "dumb" in many aspects, but without exploring why they fail that doesn't tell us whether this is some inherent lack of ability to represent reasoning or understanding, or simply holes in their training. There's no reason to assume the training data LLMs currently learn on is in any way equivalent to the data a human child is exposed to growing up, so there is no reason to assume it will have the same strengths and weaknesses in what it is able to reason about and that we can therefore draw conclusions about it's overall ability just from probing something that appears like it should be simple to a human. (and incidentally, I think people here will overestimate massively how well humans would do on the consonant test above; even native English speakers without any recent exposure to being taught rules as opposed to "just" using the language - many would be able to do it, but I'd be able to bet many would struggle, though most who'd struggle would express that doubt)

astrange 3y ago

There's no such thing as a world model. People don't solve problems by creating world models. That term was invented by 70s AI researchers, but remember that those people failed. Their research wasn't actually correct, so you shouldn't reuse it.

wilg 3y ago

No. We know that LLMs make world models. (Often literally: https://twitter.com/wesg52/status/1709551516577902782 https://twitter.com/wesg52/status/1709551516577902782). I should also point out that your tone is aggressive, so it makes me think you're not interested in learning. But I'm going to proceed anyway. It cannot understand these properties of words well because it does not operate on words, it operates on tokens. You can see examples here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears inside the token, because it does not ever receive that information. The only way it could get that information is if the training data explicitly attempted to work around this limitation. But I would also appreciate insight from someone with a deeper understanding of the internals of these big LLMs.

Jensson 3y ago
> I should also point out that your tone is aggressive, so it makes me think you're not interested in learning Why do you think that? Aggressiveness is the best way to get responses, people don't like it but it makes people respond to you. And for that matter I have a pretty good understanding about this topic, it is kind of annoying when people try to school you then. The "it gets tokenized data" is just a cop out response by people who don't understand the problem. > It cannot understand these properties of words without them being in the training data because it does not operate on words, it operates on tokens But those properties are in the training data. We know the LLM can answer these sort of questions when asked directly for simpler cases. But when asked to do something that requires it to draw from many different parts it fails. It didn't fail due to the data not being there, it failed due to not understanding that it should use that data. > This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears _inside the token_, because _it does not ever receive that information_ Right, the structure of LLM makes these sort of questions harder for it. But they aren't impossible or unfair, nothing prevents an LLM model from solving this sort of question. The main reason it fails is that it tries to write it like a human would, as it isn't trained to solve problems it is trained to mimic humans, it is too dumb to figure out ways to solve it on its own. And to show you I understand how these models works, the most efficient way to solve this question would be to solve it like a human. If it wrote out the steps "try next word as 'Blah'" and then verify those words one at a time, likely it would succeed. And since we know LLMs work like that we could try to make it output the results in that way, and that would improve performance. However, a smart agent would understand that its answer was wrong in that case by itself, and change its answering style on its own to fit the problem. But it can't think like that, it just tries to write it like answers it has seen, it doesn't do any verification since the answers it saw didn't verify, it doesn't spell things out here since the answers it saw didn't spell things out etc.
- wilg 3y ago
  I’m not interested in continuing to talk to you.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    If you don't want to talk more stop posting instead of posting that you want to stop posting. If everyone who wanted to stop posting posted that they want to stop posting it would clutter the board too much.
    - wilg 3y ago
      Let me be clearer, you’re frustrating to engage with on this topic, which you should reconsider. And other posters should consider avoiding engaging with you on this.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        Well, I am trying to explain why your original meme post "it just reads tokens, it can't do that" is wrong. That meme is tiring, and the most tiring with trying to fight such memes is that so many comes and repeats it and it is very hard to change their mind. But yeah, I should have been more clear to target that meme so that you didn't feel it was about you. It is easy to accidentally make things a bit too personal.
        wilg 3y ago
        OK, thanks. I'm not claiming its impossible for an LLM to learn this, just that it appears to be much harder (perhaps by requiring more data) when the task involves fighting against tokenization. For example, it can base64 encode your phrase "What was once dormant may soon angrily awake" correctly, and it can reverse the letters correctly. But it fails to do the same on the example text from the OpenAI tokenizer.
telotortium 3y ago
> This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears inside the token, because it does not ever receive that information. More difficult, but it shouldn't be impossible. The Chinese managed to make rhyming dictionaries over 1000 years ago despite using a non-phonetic writing system. More relevantly, GPT-4 has definitely ingested both regular and rhyming dictionaries.
- wilg 3y ago
  I agree it should be possible.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Possible, certainly, but given the difficulties it has with it, it appears it likely requires more training. Unlike with Chinese, the LLMs will not benefit from extensive training data mapping its tokens to and from sounds or rhyming with other words, but need to derive during training from data that rarely mentions these tokens at all.
maxdoop 3y ago
What does it mean to understand?

grumbel 3y ago

Asking an LLM about letters is like asking a human about the individual wavelength that make up color. They might be able to infer it from text they read, but their sensory system is simply incapable of detecting any of that directly.

Jensson 3y ago
Not comparable at all, humans cant determine wavelength by sight since it isn't a perfect representation of the data. LLMs however can determine the letters based on its tokens, since those tokens are a perfect representation of the data. We already know they can do this, just ask it to translate to Base64 or something similar, it knows perfectly well what letters the words are made up of.
- vidarh 3y ago
  LLMs need to learn those mappings, because they're not inherent in the tokens, the same way humans need to learn mappings from colours to wavelengths. That one is not a perfect one to one representation of the data is entirely irrelevant. That they can learn it in a given context does not mean they have learnt every relationship the same way humans miss all kinds of relationships as well without being pointed right at them. There's no doubt that LLMs are "dumb" in many aspects, but without exploring why they fail that doesn't tell us whether this is some inherent lack of ability to represent reasoning or understanding, or simply holes in their training. There's no reason to assume the training data LLMs currently learn on is in any way equivalent to the data a human child is exposed to growing up, so there is no reason to assume it will have the same strengths and weaknesses in what it is able to reason about and that we can therefore draw conclusions about it's overall ability just from probing something that appears like it should be simple to a human. (and incidentally, I think people here will overestimate massively how well humans would do on the consonant test above; even native English speakers without any recent exposure to being taught rules as opposed to "just" using the language - many would be able to do it, but I'd be able to bet many would struggle, though most who'd struggle would express that doubt)