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What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
- mooreds 3y agoRelated git repo from bottom of essay: https://github.com/ianmiell/llm_history_essay/tree/main https://github.com/ianmiell/llm_history_essay/tree/main
- gumballindie 3y agoGarbage in, garbage out.
- kibibu 3y agoAre you suggesting the 10MB of references were garbage? I don't understand what you mean.
- LoganDark 3y agoIs 10MB enough to fine-tune a model nowadays? Assuming that the base model is fairly well-trained already, of course.
- regularfry 3y agoIt's not fine-tuning, it's RAG.
- mirekrusin 3y agoRAGs are great for glossary like structured information. Arbitrarily chunking prose text feels like making garbage out of otherwise good quality text. Ideally prose would be used to generate glossary like documents (LLM aided). Performance plays role here (you'd need to process a lot of text up front) so maybe smaller models could be used?
- gchamonlive 3y agoI think as long as you are below 50% context window, performance should be ok (https://dev.to/maximsaplin/gpt-4-128k-context-it-is-not-big-enough-1h02 https://dev.to/maximsaplin/gpt-4-128k-context-it-is-not-big-...)
- jcims 3y agoThis is something that has always bothered me about RAG. It seems that it’s fine for first order relevance, like a search engine, but for knowledge there needs to be some kind of rumination stage where it revisits the entire corpus to find information that has a second order relevance to round out its ‘understanding’. You might be able to approximate by chunking and globbing the chunks and searching for those, as well as having the LLM summarize and extract data and search for those items as well.
- meehai 3y agoisn't this what llamaindex is doing though?
- LoganDark 3y agoOh, so it's not fine-tuning the model, it's allowing the model to recall things from a database. (I didn't read the article before commenting)
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoRetrieval augmented generation, apparently.
- CSSer 3y agoYeah, and I swear that term appeared out of nowhere. I feel like a year ago we were called it vector embeddings, but I’m no expert.
- regularfry 3y agoSometimes the terminology is around but not well distributed. I'm not sure this is the paper that coined it, but here's an example from 2020: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401
- Der_Einzige 3y agoThese days it’s enough to completely mindbreak a model via DPO. Seeing how modern open source LLMs are willing to do anything was quite a surprise given how locked down ChatGPT is.
- piuantiderp 3y agoJust like democracy
- gumballindie 3y agoI am not sure how democracy is relevant to this post but yes. See the UK - democratically making one poor choice after the other due a steady but obvious cultural decline. Garbage in, garbage out.
- avidphantasm 3y ago[flagged]
- jampekka 3y agoJournalists have found the lifehack way earlier: just copypaste with minor tweaks whatever some lobbyist says or press releases.
- avidphantasm 3y agoI would say that the primary benefit of having journalists is not to produce articles for papers or magazines, but to have people who understand what’s happening and why. Communicating that understanding is also important, but if you don’t have the understanding, you can’t communicate it. I don’t see LLMs as playing any significant role in building understanding. Humans need to process (read and write notes about) information to understand it. Also, the problem of LLM hallucination make them unsuitable for any serious use.
- wongarsu 3y agoMost journalists halucinate at least as much information as LLMs. There is a small number of publications that try to do reasonably well, but most have enganged in such a race to the bottom that I'd expect a current generation LLM to produce more accurate articles if given the same sources
- raesene9 3y agoIn an ideal world, I'm sure what you say is true, but in the real world of publications and incentives for journalists, I doubt that's what happens. Anyone reading news media recently will have noticed the vast amount of badly written/researched articles, often with click-bait headlines. Recently I've even noticed that sources considered "high quality" like the Times in the UK are heavily using click-bait techniques.
- ben_w 3y agoI'd say that "people who understand what’s happening and why" would not be unique to journalists, but also be true for all intelligence analysts feeding into the government (and that this is why dictatorships don't all instantly fall over due to a lack of a free press). I think the USP of a free press is to shine a light on the issues missed by the formal government — be that large-scale corruption, or hyper-local potholes, or systemic racism or sexism in some (public or private) institution. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Ideally, if not in reality, it's the press.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago> History students using AI should be much more productive than they were in my day! I wonder whether essays are far longer now than they used to be. We should not aim for endless productivity. In this world of surplus information, "click-bait" titles, SEO content, etc., we should aim to produce less. This includes learning: learning should be done as a meditative process to understand the human condition, not simply to output the most comprehensive essay. While the end result might be interesting, the most worrisome part about this is the mentality: the general attitude of becoming too machine-like moves us away from quiet solitude that is so integral to humanity.
- talldatethrow 3y ago"they knew so much, and understood so little"
- tcbawo 3y agoProducing too much content to be absorbed and processed is detrimental to society. In the past, it was reasonably easy to filter out duplicate and redundant information. With AI, this is less and less so. Information overload is a real thing. People will have less and less in common, as their opinions and world views are shaped differently by external stimuli.
- heisenbit 3y agoIt is a valid thought (which I suspect was done with a wink) that is worth following. If students are more productive (in terms of output volume) how are teachers going to cope with that? Do we need to delegate grading of AI output to AIs? Will this contribute to the heating of the planet or does it lead to a self improving and aware AI? And another concern: Writing is sorting thoughts and putting them in order. Writing is thinking. If students delegate writing will they learn to think?
- voidhorse 3y agoAmen. Since Chat GPT took off I've continued to believe it's biggest contribution to society will be that it greatly improves the ability of individuals to generate massive amounts of noise which they can add to the sea of unnavigable garbage the internet has already become. The power to produce more in less time is a net negative that ultimately lends itself to entropy, it is not a positive thing at all unless you completely ignore social and holistic effects in favor of a machiavellian hyper-individualist perspective which claims that any means and any consequence is acceptable to satisfy the isolated, local needs of single individuals at any given point in time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kratom_sandwich 3y agoCan anyone comment on the issue of hallucinations? The author only mentions them briefly and I cannot gather how big of a problem this is. Apart from the literal quote the LLM hallucinated, wouldn’t all the other information have to be double-checked as well?
- eric-burel 3y agoThere are many recently published or preprint research papers around that, not necessarily that hard to read I think. As a consultant this totally prevents me from making any professional use of LLMs at the moment (edit: aside from actual creative work, but then you may hit the copyright issues). But even without hallucination, using non scholar sources for training is also a problem, Wikipedia is great for common knowledge but become harmful at a certain point where you need nuanced and precise expertise.
- genman 3y agoThe other problem of Wikipedia is it being a target of hostile politically motivated attacks that attempt to rewrite the history. It it will normally self-correct but time to time there are pieces of information that are maliciously incorrect.
- prirun 3y agoIMO, hallucinations make it basically unusable for things it should be very good at. For example, I have asked two different AIs what the option is for changing the block size with HashBackup (I'm the author). This is clearly documented in many places on the HashBackup site. The first time, the AI said to use the -b option to the backup program, with examples etc. But there is no -b option, and never has been. The 2nd time, the AI said to set the blocksize ("or something similar"; WTF good is it to say that?) parameter in hashbackup.conf. But there has never has been a hashbackup.conf file. From examples I've seen, AI tends to do a passable job spewing a long-winded response where asking several different humans would give similar long-winded responses that contained a lot of judgement and opinions, some of which could be valid or not.
- jcgrillo 3y ago> I didn’t go to lectures. They were way too early in the afternoon for me to get out of bed for. ... > This appreciation of which texts were important, and what I was being invited to write about happened much faster than would have been the case pre-Internet. I really do wonder how students do this today (get in touch if you can tell me!). Maybe listening to people who are well versed in the subject and the current state of the academic conversation? You can find such people lecturing, sometimes ;)
- zwischenzug 3y agoMy flippancy aside: lectures weren't directly related to the tutorial system at Oxford, so it was unclear the benefit of going to centralised lectures was over just studying the source material. It was pretty universal to do just that, and ignore the lectures.
- BeefDinnerPurge 3y agoWhat makes me sad, but also 100% unsurprised, is that this is exactly the opposite of the killer use case for LLMs. They should be used to summarize bloated ad-infested clickbait articles down to one paragraph or a series of bullet points. I don't want to read about the author's childhood, where the best place is to get the stuff the article is about, or some random anecdotes about that stuff and the author's unresolved childhood trauma that somehow have something to do with that stuff and something that happened with the author's relative(s). I just want to know what I searched for in the first place: how to do what I want to do with that stuff and nothing more. Seems like an open and shut killer use case for sub-AGI LLMs to me, but also a nice thing, so that's why we can't have it.
- tmshu1 3y agoCool post! Would love to try this with some of my own texts. How did you get Ollama to generate text based in your source texts?