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Haven't LLMs simply obsoleted OpenCyc? What could introducing OpenCyc add to LLMs, and why wouldn't allowing the LLM to look up Wikipedia articles accomplish th
by cjbprime 2y ago
Haven't LLMs simply obsoleted OpenCyc? What could introducing OpenCyc add to LLMs, and why wouldn't allowing the LLM to look up Wikipedia articles accomplish the same thing?
- drdaeman 2y agoI’m not familiar with Cyc/OpenCyc, but it seems that it’s not just a knowledge base, but also does inference and reasoning - while LLMs don’t reason and will happily produce completely illogical statements.
- p1esk 2y agoCan you please give an example of a “completely illogical statement” produced by o1 model? I suspect it would be easier to get an average human to produce an illogical statement.
- n2d4 2y agoGive it anything that sounds like a riddle, but isn't. Just one example: > H: The surgeon, who is the boy's father, says "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" Who is the surgeon of the boy? > O1: The surgeon is the boy’s mother. Also, just because humans don't always think rationally doesn't mean ChatGPT does.
- pezezin 2y agoHaha, you are right, I just asked Copilot, and it replied this: > This is a classic riddle! The surgeon is actually the boy's mother. The riddle plays on the assumption that a surgeon is typically male, but in this case, the surgeon is the boy's mother. > Did you enjoy this riddle? Do you have any more you'd like to share or solve?
- throw310822 2y agoHa, good one! Claude gets it wrong too, except for apologizing and correcting itself when questioned: "I was trying to find a clever twist that isn't actually there. The riddle appears to just be a straightforward statement - a father who is a surgeon saying he can't operate on his son" More than being illogical, it seems that LLMs can be too hasty and too easily attracted by known patterns. People do the same.
- varjag 2y agoIt's amazing how great these canned apologies work at anthropomorphising LLMs. It wasn't really in haste, it simply failed because the nuance fell below noise in its training set data but you rectified it with your follow-up correction.
- throw310822 2y agoWell, first of all it failed twice: first it spat out the canned riddle answer, then once I asked it to "double check" it said "sorry, I was wrong: the surgeon IS the boy's father, so there must be a second surgeon..." Then the follow up correction did have the effect of making it look harder at the question. It actually wrote: "Let me look at EXACTLY what's given" (with the all caps). It's not very different from a person that decides to focus harder on a problem once it was fooled by it a couple of times already because it is trickier than it seems. So yes, surprisingly human, with all its flaws.
- varjag 2y agoBut thing is it wasn't trickier than it seemed. It was simply an outlier entry, like the flipped tortoise question that tripped the android in the Bladerunner interrogation scene. It was not able to think harder without your input.
- seymore_12 2y agoGrok gives this as an excuse for answering "The surgeon is the boy's mother." : <<Because the surgeon, who is the boy's father, says, "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" This indicates that there is another parent involved who is also a surgeon. Given that the statement specifies the boy's father cannot operate, the other surgeon must be the boy's mother.>> Sounds plausible and on the first read, almost logical.
- wanderer2323 2y agoEasy, from my recent chat with o1: (Asked about left null space) ‘’’ these are the vectors that when viewed as linear functionals, annihilate every column of A . <…> Another way to view it: these are the vectors orthogonal to the row space. ‘’’ It’s quite obvious that vectors that “annihilate the columns” would be orthogonal to the column space not the row space. I don’t know if you think o1 is magic. It still hallucinates, just less often and less obvious.
- brokensegue 2y agoaverage humans don't know what "column spaces" are or what "orthogonal" means
- Sabinus 2y agoAverage humans don't (usually) confidently give you answers to questions they do now know the meaning of. Nor would you ask them.
- throw310822 2y agoAh hum. The discriminant is whether they know that they don't know. If they don't, they will happily spit out whatever comes to their mind.
- leklund 2y agoSure average humans don’t do that, but this is hackernews where it’s completely normal for commenters to confidently answer questions and opine on topics they know absolutely nothing about.
- mdp2021 2y agoAnd why would the "average human" count?! "Support, the calculator gave a bad result for 345987*14569" // "Yes, well, also your average human would" ...That why we do not ask "average humans"!
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- rcxdude 2y agoSuch systems tend to be equally good at producing nonsense: mainly because it's really hard to make a consistent set of 'facts', and once you have inconsistencies, creative enough logic can produce nonsense in any part of the system.
- 2ro 2y agoCyc apparently addresses this issue with what are termed "microtheories" - in one theory something can be so, and in a different theory it can be not so: https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/microtheory/ https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/microtheory/
- cookiengineer 2y agoLLMs have just ignored the fundamental problem of reasoning: symbolic inference. They haven't "solved" it, they just don't give a damn about logical correctness.
- wordpad25 2y agological correctness as in formal logic is a huge step down LLMs understand context and meaning and genuine intention
- 2ro 2y agoCyc apparently addresses this issue with what are termed "microtheories" - in one theory something can be so, and in a different theory it can be not so: https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/microtheory/ https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/microtheory/
- optimalsolver 2y ago>A microtheory (Mt), also referred to as a context, is a Cyc constant denoting assertions which are grouped together because they share a set of assumptions This sounds like a world model with extra-steps, and a rather brittle one at that. How do you choose between two conflicting "microtheories"?
- rurban 2y agoNo, they are completely orthogonal. LLM are likelyhood completers, and classifiers. OpenCYC brings some logic and rationale into the classifiers. Without rationale LLM will continue hallucinating, spitting out nonsense.
- tpm 2y agoLLMs don't know what is true (they have no way of knowing that), but they can babble about any topic. OpenCyc contains 'truth'. If they can be meaningfully combined, it could be good. It's the same as using LLM for programming, when you have a way to evaluate the output, then it's fine, if not, you can't trust the output as it could be completely hallucinated.