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Any tests that are unfalsifiable and can’t be reproduced are meaningless when it comes to gauging the performance of LLMs (and most other things). I could also

Any tests that are unfalsifiable and can’t be reproduced are meaningless when it comes to gauging the performance of LLMs (and most other things). I could also post on a subreddit and say I have a secret set of German tests that may or may not exist and and I like these models, but that does nothing to advance the science of evaluating these things. If you want to evaluate human preferences, you can use chatbot arena, which can be gamed, but at least reflects more than what one guy says to be true. And this is with me agreeing that Nous-Capybara is also a good model. But don’t take my word for it because it’s not worth very much!

vessenes 3y ago
I think we agree on almost everything about this - which is to say, probably both you and I think the Wolfram Ravenwolf tests are just about useful enough to indicate whether or not a model might be worth downloading, but certainly not enough to justify spending money, say, or planning around. So, yes, I'm with you. I agree that better ways to evaluate models would be super super useful, and benchmarks like MMLU and whatever's next will continue to be helpful ("real" science). And, it seems like there may even be some benefits for models to training to 'ace the test' more broadly, which is interesting, and ties to some educational theories in teaching humans. However, one area that open tests can't excel in is in this "fair" evaluation arena -- and I do think that private tests have some value there, to the extent that they can show utility and maintain trust. I don't make any claims about German sex role-play being a good or bad start for these, though.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  I think there’s room for private tests, but those should probably be done by some kind of independent standards body. LLMs are an incredible advancement of machine learning research, but we diminish that when we let these kind of wholly unscientific evaluations predominate and especially in open source, where so much great work is otherwise being done to combat the monopoly tactics of big tech.

vessenes 3y ago

I think we agree on almost everything about this - which is to say, probably both you and I think the Wolfram Ravenwolf tests are just about useful enough to indicate whether or not a model might be worth downloading, but certainly not enough to justify spending money, say, or planning around. So, yes, I'm with you. I agree that better ways to evaluate models would be super super useful, and benchmarks like MMLU and whatever's next will continue to be helpful ("real" science). And, it seems like there may even be some benefits for models to training to 'ace the test' more broadly, which is interesting, and ties to some educational theories in teaching humans. However, one area that open tests can't excel in is in this "fair" evaluation arena -- and I do think that private tests have some value there, to the extent that they can show utility and maintain trust. I don't make any claims about German sex role-play being a good or bad start for these, though.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
I think there’s room for private tests, but those should probably be done by some kind of independent standards body. LLMs are an incredible advancement of machine learning research, but we diminish that when we let these kind of wholly unscientific evaluations predominate and especially in open source, where so much great work is otherwise being done to combat the monopoly tactics of big tech.