4 ms·

you need context for the dry statutes sure, you download all the legal arguments, and hope that putting all this on top of a general LLM which has enough conte

by pas 2y ago

you need context for the dry statutes sure, you download all the legal arguments, and hope that putting all this on top of a general LLM which has enough context to deal with usual human, American, contemporary stuff the argument is that it's not really enough for the next jump (as it would need "exponentially" more data) as far as a I understand

menaerus 2y ago
I don't understand the limitation, e.g. how much data do you need to train the "law state" specific LLM that doesn't know anything else but that? Such LLM does not need to have 400B of parameters since it's not a general knowledge LLM but perhaps I'm wrong on this (?). So my point rather is that it may very well be, let's take for example, a 30B parameters LLM which in turn means that we might have just enough data to train it. Larger contexts in smaller models are a solved problem.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  > how much data do you need to train the "law state" specific LLM that doesn't know anything else but that? Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t have a useful LLM for state law that doesn’t have an exceptional grounding in real world objects of mechanics. You could force a bright young child to memorize a large text, but without a strong general model of the world, they’re just regurgitating words rather than able to reason about it.
  - menaerus 2y ago
    Counter-argument: code does not exist in vacuum yet we have small and mid-sized LLMs that can already output reasonable code.
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      Generally they’ve been distilled from much larger models, but also, code is a much smaller domain than the law.
      - noirbot 2y ago
        Code is both much smaller as a domain and less prone to the chaos of human interpretation. There are many factors that go into why a given civil or criminal case in court turns out how it does, and often the biggest one is not "was it legal". Giving a computer access to the full written history of cases doesn't give you any of the context of why those cases turned out. A judge or jury isn't going to include in the written record that they just really didn't like one of the lawyers. Or that the case settled because one of the parties just couldn't afford to keep going. Or that one party or the other destroyed/withheld evidence. Generally speaking, your compiler won't just decide not to work as expected. Tons of legal decisions don't actually follow the law as written. Or even the precedent set by other courts. And that's even assuming the law and precedent are remotely clear in the first place.
        zozbot234 2y ago
        A model that's trained on legal decisions can still be used to explore these questions, though. The model may end up being uncertain about which way the case will go, or even more strikingly, it may be confident about the outcome of a case that then is decided differently, and you can try and figure out what's going on with such cases.
        sharih 2y ago
        legal reasoning involves applying facts to the law, and it needs knowledge of the world. the expertise of a professional is in picking the right/winning path based on their study of the law, the facts and their real world training. money is in codifying that to teach models to do the same
        noirbot 2y ago
        But what value does that have? The difference between a armchair lawyer and a real actual lawyer is in knowing when something is legal/illegal, but unlikely to be seen that way in a court or brought to a favorable verdict. It's knowing which cases you can actually win, and how much it'll cost and why. Most of that is not in scope of what an LLM could be trained on, or even what an LLM would be good at. What you're training in that case would be someone who's an opinion columnist or twitter poster. Not an actual lawyer.
    - mkoryak 2y ago
      I'm going to push back on "produce reasonable code". I've seen reasonable code written by AI, and also code that looks reasonable but contains bugs and logic errors that can be found if you're an expert in that type of code. In other words, I don't think we can rely solely on AI to write code.
      - skissane 2y ago
        I've seen a lot of code written by humans that "looks reasonable but contains bugs and logic errors that can be found if you're an expert in that type of code".
        mkoryak 2y ago
        What does that have to do with the state of the AI?
- theptip 2y ago
  For a “legal LLM” you need three things: general IQ / common sense at a substantially higher level than current, understanding of the specific rules, and hallucination-free recall of the relevant legal facts/cases. I think it’s reasonable to assume you can get 2/3 with a small corpus IF you have an IQ 150 AGI. Empirically the current known method for increasing IQ is to make the model bigger. Part of what you’re getting at is possible though, once you have the big model you can distill it down to a smaller number of parameters without losing much capability in your chosen narrow domain. So you forget physics and sports but remain good at law. That doesn’t help you with improving the capability frontier though.
  - pas 2y ago
    And then your Juris R. Genius gets a new case about two Red Socks fans getting into a fight and without missing a beat starts blabbering about how overdosing on too much red pigments from the undergarments caused their rage!
    - theptip 2y ago
      Yeah, I think for the highest-value activities (eg legal advice) you expect to run the full frontier model. But maybe you want to run a smaller one locally on your iPhone for privacy and accept the capability loss.

by pas 2y ago

menaerus 2y ago

I don't understand the limitation, e.g. how much data do you need to train the "law state" specific LLM that doesn't know anything else but that? Such LLM does not need to have 400B of parameters since it's not a general knowledge LLM but perhaps I'm wrong on this (?). So my point rather is that it may very well be, let's take for example, a 30B parameters LLM which in turn means that we might have just enough data to train it. Larger contexts in smaller models are a solved problem.

petesergeant 2y ago
> how much data do you need to train the "law state" specific LLM that doesn't know anything else but that? Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t have a useful LLM for state law that doesn’t have an exceptional grounding in real world objects of mechanics. You could force a bright young child to memorize a large text, but without a strong general model of the world, they’re just regurgitating words rather than able to reason about it.
- menaerus 2y ago
  Counter-argument: code does not exist in vacuum yet we have small and mid-sized LLMs that can already output reasonable code.
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    Generally they’ve been distilled from much larger models, but also, code is a much smaller domain than the law.
    - noirbot 2y ago
      Code is both much smaller as a domain and less prone to the chaos of human interpretation. There are many factors that go into why a given civil or criminal case in court turns out how it does, and often the biggest one is not "was it legal". Giving a computer access to the full written history of cases doesn't give you any of the context of why those cases turned out. A judge or jury isn't going to include in the written record that they just really didn't like one of the lawyers. Or that the case settled because one of the parties just couldn't afford to keep going. Or that one party or the other destroyed/withheld evidence. Generally speaking, your compiler won't just decide not to work as expected. Tons of legal decisions don't actually follow the law as written. Or even the precedent set by other courts. And that's even assuming the law and precedent are remotely clear in the first place.
      - zozbot234 2y ago
        A model that's trained on legal decisions can still be used to explore these questions, though. The model may end up being uncertain about which way the case will go, or even more strikingly, it may be confident about the outcome of a case that then is decided differently, and you can try and figure out what's going on with such cases.
        sharih 2y ago
        legal reasoning involves applying facts to the law, and it needs knowledge of the world. the expertise of a professional is in picking the right/winning path based on their study of the law, the facts and their real world training. money is in codifying that to teach models to do the same
        noirbot 2y ago
        But what value does that have? The difference between a armchair lawyer and a real actual lawyer is in knowing when something is legal/illegal, but unlikely to be seen that way in a court or brought to a favorable verdict. It's knowing which cases you can actually win, and how much it'll cost and why. Most of that is not in scope of what an LLM could be trained on, or even what an LLM would be good at. What you're training in that case would be someone who's an opinion columnist or twitter poster. Not an actual lawyer.
  - mkoryak 2y ago
    I'm going to push back on "produce reasonable code". I've seen reasonable code written by AI, and also code that looks reasonable but contains bugs and logic errors that can be found if you're an expert in that type of code. In other words, I don't think we can rely solely on AI to write code.
    - skissane 2y ago
      I've seen a lot of code written by humans that "looks reasonable but contains bugs and logic errors that can be found if you're an expert in that type of code".
      - mkoryak 2y ago
        What does that have to do with the state of the AI?
theptip 2y ago
For a “legal LLM” you need three things: general IQ / common sense at a substantially higher level than current, understanding of the specific rules, and hallucination-free recall of the relevant legal facts/cases. I think it’s reasonable to assume you can get 2/3 with a small corpus IF you have an IQ 150 AGI. Empirically the current known method for increasing IQ is to make the model bigger. Part of what you’re getting at is possible though, once you have the big model you can distill it down to a smaller number of parameters without losing much capability in your chosen narrow domain. So you forget physics and sports but remain good at law. That doesn’t help you with improving the capability frontier though.
- pas 2y ago
  And then your Juris R. Genius gets a new case about two Red Socks fans getting into a fight and without missing a beat starts blabbering about how overdosing on too much red pigments from the undergarments caused their rage!
  - theptip 2y ago
    Yeah, I think for the highest-value activities (eg legal advice) you expect to run the full frontier model. But maybe you want to run a smaller one locally on your iPhone for privacy and accept the capability loss.