4 ms·

IDK, I think it's kinda important for LLMs to get the simple stuff correct in order to justify looking into the rest of the hallucinations. Like, if you can't

by xracy 2y ago

IDK, I think it's kinda important for LLMs to get the simple stuff correct in order to justify looking into the rest of the hallucinations. Like, if you can't tell me "what day is it today?" (actual failed prompt I have seen) then there's no world where I'm going to have a more complicated follow-up conversation with you. It's just not worth my time or yours.

somenameforme 2y ago
I agree with this, but find it a poor mode of debate. Because it results in a hole-plugging which is then called goal shifting, even though it's not - but rather a lack of precision in the goal to begin with. For example imagine it goes viral that 'wow look LLMs can't even play a half decent game of chess.' So OpenAI or whoever decides to dedicate an immense amount of post-training, hard-coding, and other fun stuff to enabling LLMs to play a decent game of chess. But has anything changed? Well no, because it's obviously trivially possible for them to play a decent game of chess (or correctly assess the date), but it's an example of a more general issue of LLMs being generally incapable of consistently engaging in simple tasks across arbitrary domains. So you have software that can score some high thing on the LSAT or whatever, but can't competently engage in a game children can play. The over-specialization for the sake of generating headlines and over-fitting benchmarks is, IMO, not productive. At least not in terms of creating optimal systems. If the goal is to generate money, which I guess it is, then it must be considered productive.
- xracy 2y ago
  I'm not asking for someone to overfit to being able to properly answer the question of "What day is it today?" I'm giving an example of a simple question that all LLMs need to be able to answer correctly. But like, people are on here saying that this will make scientific improvements, and until it can get past the basic stuff, it's not in the ballpark of anything more complicated. Right now, we're basically at the stage of 10 million monkeys on 10 million typewriters for 10 million hours. Like, maybe we'll get Shakespeare out of it, but are we willing to sort through all of the crap it will generate along the way, when it can't actually create a useful answer to simple questions?

by xracy 2y ago

somenameforme 2y ago

I agree with this, but find it a poor mode of debate. Because it results in a hole-plugging which is then called goal shifting, even though it's not - but rather a lack of precision in the goal to begin with. For example imagine it goes viral that 'wow look LLMs can't even play a half decent game of chess.' So OpenAI or whoever decides to dedicate an immense amount of post-training, hard-coding, and other fun stuff to enabling LLMs to play a decent game of chess. But has anything changed? Well no, because it's obviously trivially possible for them to play a decent game of chess (or correctly assess the date), but it's an example of a more general issue of LLMs being generally incapable of consistently engaging in simple tasks across arbitrary domains. So you have software that can score some high thing on the LSAT or whatever, but can't competently engage in a game children can play. The over-specialization for the sake of generating headlines and over-fitting benchmarks is, IMO, not productive. At least not in terms of creating optimal systems. If the goal is to generate money, which I guess it is, then it must be considered productive.

xracy 2y ago
I'm not asking for someone to overfit to being able to properly answer the question of "What day is it today?" I'm giving an example of a simple question that all LLMs need to be able to answer correctly. But like, people are on here saying that this will make scientific improvements, and until it can get past the basic stuff, it's not in the ballpark of anything more complicated. Right now, we're basically at the stage of 10 million monkeys on 10 million typewriters for 10 million hours. Like, maybe we'll get Shakespeare out of it, but are we willing to sort through all of the crap it will generate along the way, when it can't actually create a useful answer to simple questions?