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I’d genuinely expect the people who built and operate the thing to have a far better write up than what amounted to “it no worked lol”. Sure, NN’s are opaque, b

I’d genuinely expect the people who built and operate the thing to have a far better write up than what amounted to “it no worked lol”. Sure, NN’s are opaque, but this org paints itself as the herald and shepard of ai and they just produced a write up that’s hardly worthy of a primary-school-child’s account of their recent holiday.

thethimble 3y ago
Random sampling issues due to problems with the inference kernels on certain GPU configurations. This seems like a clear root cause and has nothing to do with the magic of NNs. I don’t understand what the fuss is about.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  They just want to reinforce their own bias that OpenAI BAD and DUMB, rationalism GOOD! When it’s their own fault for not understanding enough theory to know what happens if there were to be a loss of precision in the predicted embedding vector that maps to a token. If enough decimal places are lopped off or nudged then that moves the predicted vector slightly away from where it should be and you get a nearby token instead. Instant aphasia. The report said it was a GPU configuration problem so my guess is the wrong precision was used in some number of GPUs but I have no idea how they configure their cluster so take that with a giant grain of salt.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Yep. Some obviously made their mind up before the page even rendered.
  - meowface 3y ago
    Agreed, but I think they raise a fair point that some kind of automated testing probably should've existed to look for sudden major changes in prompt -> output production between versions, with lots of prompt test cases. Maybe this testing did exist but this problem just didn't surface, for some reason?
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    > so my guess is the wrong precision was used in some number of GPUs Well we wouldn’t have to guess if their PM wasn’t so pointlessly vague would we?
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  If that’s what it was, they’ve done a fabulously bad job of conveying that, and then made no attempt to dig into why _that_ happened. Which, again, is like going “well it broke because it broke”, not even so much as a “this can happen because some bit of hardware had a cosmic bit flip and freaked out, generally happens with a probability of 1:x”.
drpossum 3y ago
You have high expectations of the people who you would typically run across in this space.
ben_w 3y ago
"More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations." As someone who learned to read in part with the Commodore 64 user manual telling me about PEEK and POKE while I was actually in primary school, I think you're greatly overstating what primary school children write about in their holidays. Snark aside, is their message vague? Sure. But more words wouldn't actually tell us more unless they also published a lot more about their setup — "we were casting float16 to uint16 on line 249 of server_config.c" isn't going to really help either. Also, here's a recent security update from Apple to compare against: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT214056 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT214056
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  Those at least link back to a CVE, which often does have all the gory technical details. I think your counter-example swings too far in the other direction. Nobody expects a git-diff of the fix, but a solid explanation of the whys and wherefore’s isn’t unreasonable. Cloudflare does, fly.io does, etc etc.
lynx23 3y ago
Well, the YouTube app ChangeLog on iOS uses the same template since years: "fixed space-time continuum". This is a trend, to pretend that users are too dumb to understand the complexity of things, so just do some handwaving and thats it.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Those splines don't reticulate themselves, you know.
sam0x17 3y ago
case in point: one of the root system prompts leaked out recently and it's pretty clear the "laziness" on a number of fronts is directly because of the root system prompt.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  I know about the leaked prompts and the laziness issues, but haven't read the prompt. What specifically about the prompt changes do you feel have led to laziness?
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
The way companies choose to portray themselves is a rather unreliable way of predicting their actions.

thethimble 3y ago

Random sampling issues due to problems with the inference kernels on certain GPU configurations. This seems like a clear root cause and has nothing to do with the magic of NNs. I don’t understand what the fuss is about.

throwuwu 3y ago
They just want to reinforce their own bias that OpenAI BAD and DUMB, rationalism GOOD! When it’s their own fault for not understanding enough theory to know what happens if there were to be a loss of precision in the predicted embedding vector that maps to a token. If enough decimal places are lopped off or nudged then that moves the predicted vector slightly away from where it should be and you get a nearby token instead. Instant aphasia. The report said it was a GPU configuration problem so my guess is the wrong precision was used in some number of GPUs but I have no idea how they configure their cluster so take that with a giant grain of salt.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  Yep. Some obviously made their mind up before the page even rendered.
- meowface 3y ago
  Agreed, but I think they raise a fair point that some kind of automated testing probably should've existed to look for sudden major changes in prompt -> output production between versions, with lots of prompt test cases. Maybe this testing did exist but this problem just didn't surface, for some reason?
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  > so my guess is the wrong precision was used in some number of GPUs Well we wouldn’t have to guess if their PM wasn’t so pointlessly vague would we?
FridgeSeal 3y ago
If that’s what it was, they’ve done a fabulously bad job of conveying that, and then made no attempt to dig into why _that_ happened. Which, again, is like going “well it broke because it broke”, not even so much as a “this can happen because some bit of hardware had a cosmic bit flip and freaked out, generally happens with a probability of 1:x”.

drpossum 3y ago

You have high expectations of the people who you would typically run across in this space.

ben_w 3y ago

"More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations." As someone who learned to read in part with the Commodore 64 user manual telling me about PEEK and POKE while I was actually in primary school, I think you're greatly overstating what primary school children write about in their holidays. Snark aside, is their message vague? Sure. But more words wouldn't actually tell us more unless they also published a lot more about their setup — "we were casting float16 to uint16 on line 249 of server_config.c" isn't going to really help either. Also, here's a recent security update from Apple to compare against: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT214056 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT214056

FridgeSeal 3y ago
Those at least link back to a CVE, which often does have all the gory technical details. I think your counter-example swings too far in the other direction. Nobody expects a git-diff of the fix, but a solid explanation of the whys and wherefore’s isn’t unreasonable. Cloudflare does, fly.io does, etc etc.

lynx23 3y ago

Well, the YouTube app ChangeLog on iOS uses the same template since years: "fixed space-time continuum". This is a trend, to pretend that users are too dumb to understand the complexity of things, so just do some handwaving and thats it.

jstarfish 3y ago
Those splines don't reticulate themselves, you know.

sam0x17 3y ago

case in point: one of the root system prompts leaked out recently and it's pretty clear the "laziness" on a number of fronts is directly because of the root system prompt.

fzzzy 3y ago
I know about the leaked prompts and the laziness issues, but haven't read the prompt. What specifically about the prompt changes do you feel have led to laziness?

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

The way companies choose to portray themselves is a rather unreliable way of predicting their actions.