3 ms·
AI more likely to create 'yes-men on servers' than any scientific breakthroughs
- setnone 1y agoAnd you should "check important info" too
- Bluestein 1y agoReminds me of the recent 'sycophancy debacle' with OpenAI.-
- johnisgood 1y agoLLMs are definitely yes-men. You ask it to do something, and it goes like "Yes sir" with lots of emojis, and then confidently gives you the wrong answer. :D Unless of course it clashes with the ToS, then it will never help you (unless you manage to engineer your prompts just right), even when it comes to something as basic as pharmacology.
- Bluestein 1y agoThe thought of LLMs doing pharmacology sends shivers down me spine ...
- johnisgood 1y agoOh no, I meant it refusing to answer pharmacology 101 questions. At one time it did not want to give me the pharmacokinetics of one medication because of its ToS.
- Bluestein 1y agoI see - thanks.- (That sounds broken. It's basic, useful, harmless information ...)
- johnisgood 1y agoExactly. I remember saying "but it is a publicly available information", that it is in books, etc. and it went on and on about "I understand your frustration, but I cannot give you ...", etc. :D In the end I did manage to get it to answer, however. This was (is) not limited to pharmacology, however.
- Bluestein 1y agoI am interested: What other fields? How did you manage?
- johnisgood 1y agoThankfully there is now searchability, so I would have to search for this particular chat, this was some time ago. I think once it starts to tell you "no", it almost never will turn to "okay, I'll tell you" (maybe only if there were one or two "no"s), so I probably started a new chat, and added how it is for research purposes and whatnot. I do not remember the specifics and I would really have to search for the chat to be able to give you specifics. I may have to search for "sorry" or something. I found something though. I asked it for the interaction between two medications, and it told me "I am sorry you are going through this, but I can't give you information about ...", which I guess is still pharmacology. Edit: I remember another case. It was related to reverse engineering. Edit #2: I found another! I cannot give you specifics, but I asked for it to give me some example sentences for something, and it went on about "consensual relationships" and so forth, even though my partner consented. I told the LLM that she did consent and it went on about that "I'm sorry, but even if she consented, I cannot give you ... because ... and is not healthy ...", and so forth. (Do not think of anything bad here! :P)
- rvnx 1y agoClaude convinced me to take a very important medication, without Claude I would not have had the balls to take it (because of the potential side-effects) and it showed me all the possible medications, and the benefits/risk balance between this and being untreated. At the end, went to doctor, offered me the same choices. No regrets so far. Without it, I would suffer for nothing. It is a very good tool to investigate and discover things, could be also the opposite: seen a bit unproductive that it is censored, because doctors are mostly here for validation anyway for serious things.
- sgt101 1y agoYou are a sensible person and took professional advice. Other people are not sensible - look at all the junkies shooting who knows what into who knows where. A system that can advise cooks to put glue on pizza is probably not the best mechanism for providing healthcare advice to at least the section of the population who are likely to try it.
- rvnx 1y agoI fully agree with you. It is an interesting tool, but to consider carefully, like you wouldn’t trust 100% what is written on the internet.
- alwa 1y agoWould you suppose said junkies would be taking advice from a qualified medical professional otherwise? For that matter, would you suppose that they don’t know what they’re doing is bad for them? Witness the smokers who crack jokes about “cancer sticks” as they light up. It seems to me that, just as we all promise our dentists we floss every day and our doctors that we promise we’ll eat better, we might be more prone to be frank with “anonymous” chatbots—and thus get more frank advice in return, at least for clear-cut factual background and tradeoffs.
- sgt101 1y agoI totally agree if the chatbots are actually reliable and controllable. LLMs have real problems with both of those things, they are unreliable in the sense that they produce text with factual inaccuracies and they are uncontrollable in that it's really hard to predict their behaviour from their past behaviour. Big open challenges in AI - I am sure that there will be solutions, but there aren't right now. I think it's very like self driving cars. Implementing a demo and showing it on the road is one thing, but then it takes twenty years before the slow roll out really gets underway.
- rusticpenn 1y agoUsing Neural nets, Deep Learning in pharma is not something new. Naturally LLMs are different. You should look into personalized medicine.
- touwer 1y agoIn this case, if it's only shivers down your spine, you're lucky ;)
- Bluestein 1y agoHeh. Well played.-
- dandanua 1y agoLLMs are the the best conmen. If they were humans people would trust them their life savings for sure.
- rvnx 1y agoOne technique is to ask: “are you sure?” “How sure are you on /20” If it says yes I am sure, and other LLMs confirms the same way, then you can be fairly confident that it is a very good candidate answer. If it says he is not sure, he is probably just agreeing with you, and better double-check by asking “is there other solutions ? What is the worst idea ?” Etc, to force it through thinking and context. It is cross-validation, and you can even cross-validate by searching on the internet. Though, 100% they say what you them want to say. Except on religion and immigration, and some other topics where it will push its own opinion.
- kingstnap 1y agoI'd rather go for internal self-consistency. For example, if it claims A > B, then it shouldn't claim B > A in a fresh chat for comparisons. In general, you shouldn't get A and not A, and you should expect A or Not A. If it can go from prompt -> result, assuming it's invertible, then result -> prompt should also partially work. An example of this is translation. The results of some mathematical solutions should go back and solve the original equations. Ex. The derivative of an antiderivative should give you back the original.
- rvnx 1y agoVery cool idea! I am going to try.
- drw85 1y agoThis is actually pretty pointless. Since the "AI" doesn't actually know anything. For example the other day i asked ChatGPT about a problem i had with some generated code that didn't compile. It then told me about a setting in the generator (nswag), that didn't exist. I told it that this setting does not exist and it said something like: "Sorry, my bad, try the following" and then kept inventing this setting with slightly different names and values over and over again. There are similar settings that exist, so it just hallucinated a tiny bit of text inside all the snippets that it learned from. This is also not the first time this happened, most of the times i tried using AI for help with things, it just made up some nonsense and wasted my time with it.
- ben_w 1y agoThey certainly can be sycophantic*, but this is why my "What ChatGPT should know about you" customisation is as follows: Honesty and truthfulness are of primary importance. Avoid American-style positivity, instead aim for German-style bluntness: I absolutely *do not* want to be told everything I ask is "great", and that goes double when it's a dumb idea. * Or fawning, I don't know how to tell them apart from the outside, even in fellow humans where we don't need to wonder if we're anthropomorphising too much. Does anyone know how to tell them apart from the outside?
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah, that sounds like a good idea. Has it worked for you so far?
- ben_w 1y agoFor me, fine. I've recently been throwing it ideas about a shed foundation (I am a complete noob with no idea what I'm doing), and it's giving me a lot of responses along the lines of: "No, don't do that, it won't work because ${foo}. At a minimum you need ${bar}." I'm also not limiting myself to ChatGPT, checking with other DIY sources — it isn't enough to only avoid sycophancy, it has to also be correct, and 90% right like it is in software is still 10% wrong, only this is wrong with the possibility of a shed drifting across a garden in a gale, or sinking into the soil as it shifts, if I do it wrong. Measure twice, cut once.
- Bluestein 1y ago> Avoid American-style positivity, instead aim for German-style bluntness Made me chuckle :)
- scotty79 1y agoThat made me think. How much of the failures of LLMs are just the failures of American culture they were trained on, just amplified. Much how mainstream internet is tainted with American bias against nudity and for copyright.
- KoolKat23 1y agoTo be honest I think the sycophancy is actually due to the built in system prompting and post-run training by the creators, rather than being something the system truly wishes to say. (An alignment quick fix)
- raincole 1y agoThe problem isn't that LLMs are yes-men though. You can definitely train an LLM that always objects. Or just add "Please strongly disagree with anything I say to you." in the system prompt. But it won't make them much more useful than they are.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoThe goal is not to give information to the user. The goal is to get information from the user. Data collection.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y agoAre scientific researchers using LLMs? I thought they used different technologies?
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoAre ML researchers "scientific researchers"? Then yes, they are using LLMs. AlphaEvolve is one such example. Are mathematicians? Then yes, for example Terrence Tao is using LLMs. AlphaProve / geometry are also examples of this, using LLMs to generate lean proofs, translate from NL to lean, and so on. And for the general "researchers", they use code generation to speed up stuff. Many scientists can code, but aren't "coders" in the professional sense. So they can use the advances in code generation to speed up their own research efforts.
- almusdives 1y agoAs a scientific researcher, I use LLMs all the time. Mainly in place of Google search, to help write code and maybe summarize a paper here and there etc. But I definitely don't use it for the actual scientific process e.g. hypothesis generation or planning analyses etc. It tends to produce a lot of vague bullshit for this kind of thing; while not wrong not entirely useful either. I have a few colleagues that do though with more success. Although I think the success comes from articulating their problem in detail (by actually writing it out to the LLM) which I think is the source of "inspiration" rather than the resulting content from the LLM.
- busssard 1y agothis is just (well needed) hype-reduction. Current Ai is definitely a yes-sayer. But, this doesnt stop people from creating group-models with one of them finetuned to be unhinged and another to be thinking out of the box etc. once we managed to transfer our skills to them (coding, analysis, maths etc.) the next step is transferring our creativity to them. It is a gradual process with human oversight.
- KolibriFly 1y agoHuman-in-the-loop will probably be essential for quite a while, but that’s not a bad thing
- KolibriFly 1y agoThe risk is we start mistaking polished summaries for insight and stall actual creative progress
- graemep 1y agoMost people are already doing that.
- barrkel 1y agoI absolutely agree, when you look at the first order. I don't quite agree when you look at a second order, applying more compute; for example, brute forcing a combination of ideas and using a judge to evaluate them. I suspect there's quite a bit of low hanging fruit in joining together different deep expertise areas. I do come back to agreeing again for paradigm shifts. You don't get to very interesting ideas without fresh approaches, questioning core assumptions then rebuilding what we had before on new foundations. It is hard to see LLMs in their current shape being able to be naive and ignorant such that existing doctrine doesn't reign in new ideas.
- stared 1y agoWell, AI (understood as LLM chats) are yes-men, precisely because they were RLHFed to to be so. If you train AI to be super skeptical, it will be so. But most people don't prefer to talk with a yes-person than a negative, inquisitive devil's advocate.
- quaestio 1y agoLLMs, though limited, may spark testable hypotheses that inspire the creation of scientifically grounded, functionally intelligent systems.
- judge123 1y ago[dead]
- Havoc 1y agoIt doesn't really need to ask smart questions for scientific breakthroughs. See something like alphafold. There is a lot of problem space left that we can brute force with current AI I also don't buy that yes-men and breakthroughs are mutually exclusive/polar opposites here.
- amelius 1y agoMake it reproduce science first. I.e., give it e.g. a DL paper, and ask it to reproduce it, writing the code and running tests, etc. Until it can do __that__, doing science and creating breakthroughs is just a bit optimistic.
- originalvichy 1y ago> Amodei argues the world is about to see the 21st century “compressed” into a few years as AI accelerates science drastically. I have the same thought but from a more negative angle. A vast share of new information in the near future will be just a repeat of whatever data the LLMs were trained on. There is a tiny sliver of LLM usage that will not be a transformation of existing data (e.g. make me a chart of this data, write me an essay) but rather ”help me create a new tool that will solve a novel problem”. I believe that’s what the person interviewed is saying in their own words. It’s hard to imagine something other than a brute force hypothesis machine that starts brute forcing solutions, but it will not be as effective as we wish if we can’t figure out how to come up with hypothesis for everything. None of what I’m saying is that insightful and I’m sure people have thought of this already. I wonder if ever there will be a Hitchhiker’s style revelation that we have had all the answers for all of our problems already, but the main issue is just incentives. Curing most cancers is probably just a money question, as is solving climate change.
- tim333 1y ago>cold water on hopes that current AI systems could revolutionize scientific progress... is a very straw man argument. No one is saying current LLMs are doing that, they are saying future AI will. (I'm excluding AlphaFold which has already been scientifically revolutionary)
- spwa4 1y agoNot really. AI CAN experiment. The problem is that that negates most of the advantages of AI for management. If you give AIs the ability to experiment directly and check, they can do that and report the results. But to do that even remotely well, you will need expert AI researchers, and subject matter experts. At which point AI has become an huge extra cost rather than cost savings. But does it work? Yes.