4 ms·

Many of my PhD and post doc colleagues who emigrated from Korea, China and India who didn’t have English as the medium of instruction would struggle with this q

Many of my PhD and post doc colleagues who emigrated from Korea, China and India who didn’t have English as the medium of instruction would struggle with this question. They only recover when you give them a hint. They’re some of the smartest people in general. If you try to stop stumping these models with trick questions and ask it straightforward reasoning systems it is extremely performant (O1 is definitely a step up though not revolutionary in my testing).

joedwin 2y ago
lol, I am neither a PhD nor a postdoc, but I am from India . I could understand the problem.
- ramraj07 2y ago
  Did you have English as your medium of instruction? If yes, do you see the irony that you also couldn’t read two sentences and see the facts straight?
maeil 2y ago
I live in one of the countries you mentioned and just showed it to one of my friends who's a local who struggles with English. They had no problem concluding that the doctor was the child's dad. Full disclosure, they assumed the doctor was pretending to be the child's dad, which is also a perfectly sound answer.
djur 2y ago
The claim was that "it knows english at or above a level equal to most fluent speakers". If the claim is that it's very good at producing reasonable responses to English text, posing "trick questions" like this would seem to be a fair test.
- _w1tm 2y ago
  Does fluency in English make someone good at solving trick questions? I usually don’t even bother trying but mostly because trick questions don’t fit my definition of entertaining.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    Fluency is a necessary but not the only prerequisite. To be able to answer a trick question, it’s first necessary to understand the question.
    - accountnum 2y ago
      No, it's necessary to either know that it's a trick question or to have a feeling that it is based on context. The entire point of a question like that is to trick your understanding. You're tricking the model because it has seen this specific trick question a million times and shortcuts to its memorized solution. Ask it literally any other question, it can be as subtle as you want it to be, and the model will pick up on the intent. As long as you don't try to mislead it. I mean, I don't even get how anyone thinks this means literally anything. I can trick people who have never heard of the trick with the 7 wives and 7 bags and so on. That doesn't mean they didn't understand, they simply did what literally any human does, make predictions based on similar questions.
      - j_maffe 2y ago
        It does mean something. It means that the model is still more on the memorization side than being able to independently evaluate a question separate from the body of knowledge it has amassed.
        accountnum 2y ago
        No, that's not a conclusion we can draw, because there is nothing much more to do than memorize the answer to this specific trick question. That's why it's a trick question, it goes against expectations and therefore the generalized intuitions you have about the domain. We can see that it doesn't memorize much at all by simply asking other questions that do require subtle understanding and generalization. You could ask the model to walk you through an imaginary environment, describing your actions. Or you could simply talk to it, quickly noticing that for any longer conversation it becomes impossibly unlikely to be found in the training data.
        2y ago
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  It's knowledge is broad and general, it does not have insight into the specifics of a person's discussion style, there are many humans that struggle with distinguishing sarcasm for instance. Hard to fault it for not being in alignment with the speaker and their strangely phrased riddle. It answers better when told "solve the below riddle".
multjoy 2y ago
“Don’t be mean to LLMs, it isn’t their fault that they’re not actually intelligent”
- K0balt 2y ago
  In general LLMs seem to function more reliably when you use pleasant language and good manners with them. I assume this is because because the same bias also shows up in the training data.
- lupire 2y ago
  "Don't anthropomorphize LLMs. They're hallucinating when they say they love that."
raincole 2y ago
I think you have particularly dumb colleagues then. If you post this question to an average STEM PhD in China (not even from China. In China) they'll get it right. This question is the "unmisleading" version of a very common misleading question about sexism. ChatGPT learned the original, misleading version too well that it can't answer the unmisleading version. Humans who don't have the original version ingrained in their brains will answer it with ease. It's not even a tricky question to humans.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > it can't answer the unmisleading version. Yes it can: https://chatgpt.com/share/66e3601f-4bec-8009-ac0c-57bfa4f0592c https://chatgpt.com/share/66e3601f-4bec-8009-ac0c-57bfa4f059...

joedwin 2y ago

lol, I am neither a PhD nor a postdoc, but I am from India . I could understand the problem.

ramraj07 2y ago
Did you have English as your medium of instruction? If yes, do you see the irony that you also couldn’t read two sentences and see the facts straight?

maeil 2y ago

I live in one of the countries you mentioned and just showed it to one of my friends who's a local who struggles with English. They had no problem concluding that the doctor was the child's dad. Full disclosure, they assumed the doctor was pretending to be the child's dad, which is also a perfectly sound answer.

djur 2y ago

The claim was that "it knows english at or above a level equal to most fluent speakers". If the claim is that it's very good at producing reasonable responses to English text, posing "trick questions" like this would seem to be a fair test.

_w1tm 2y ago
Does fluency in English make someone good at solving trick questions? I usually don’t even bother trying but mostly because trick questions don’t fit my definition of entertaining.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  Fluency is a necessary but not the only prerequisite. To be able to answer a trick question, it’s first necessary to understand the question.
  - accountnum 2y ago
    No, it's necessary to either know that it's a trick question or to have a feeling that it is based on context. The entire point of a question like that is to trick your understanding. You're tricking the model because it has seen this specific trick question a million times and shortcuts to its memorized solution. Ask it literally any other question, it can be as subtle as you want it to be, and the model will pick up on the intent. As long as you don't try to mislead it. I mean, I don't even get how anyone thinks this means literally anything. I can trick people who have never heard of the trick with the 7 wives and 7 bags and so on. That doesn't mean they didn't understand, they simply did what literally any human does, make predictions based on similar questions.
    - j_maffe 2y ago
      It does mean something. It means that the model is still more on the memorization side than being able to independently evaluate a question separate from the body of knowledge it has amassed.
      - accountnum 2y ago
        No, that's not a conclusion we can draw, because there is nothing much more to do than memorize the answer to this specific trick question. That's why it's a trick question, it goes against expectations and therefore the generalized intuitions you have about the domain. We can see that it doesn't memorize much at all by simply asking other questions that do require subtle understanding and generalization. You could ask the model to walk you through an imaginary environment, describing your actions. Or you could simply talk to it, quickly noticing that for any longer conversation it becomes impossibly unlikely to be found in the training data.
      - 2y ago
KoolKat23 2y ago
It's knowledge is broad and general, it does not have insight into the specifics of a person's discussion style, there are many humans that struggle with distinguishing sarcasm for instance. Hard to fault it for not being in alignment with the speaker and their strangely phrased riddle. It answers better when told "solve the below riddle".

multjoy 2y ago

“Don’t be mean to LLMs, it isn’t their fault that they’re not actually intelligent”

K0balt 2y ago
In general LLMs seem to function more reliably when you use pleasant language and good manners with them. I assume this is because because the same bias also shows up in the training data.
lupire 2y ago
"Don't anthropomorphize LLMs. They're hallucinating when they say they love that."

raincole 2y ago

I think you have particularly dumb colleagues then. If you post this question to an average STEM PhD in China (not even from China. In China) they'll get it right. This question is the "unmisleading" version of a very common misleading question about sexism. ChatGPT learned the original, misleading version too well that it can't answer the unmisleading version. Humans who don't have the original version ingrained in their brains will answer it with ease. It's not even a tricky question to humans.

fragmede 2y ago
> it can't answer the unmisleading version. Yes it can: https://chatgpt.com/share/66e3601f-4bec-8009-ac0c-57bfa4f0592c https://chatgpt.com/share/66e3601f-4bec-8009-ac0c-57bfa4f059...