7 ms·

All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning

84 points by benbreen 1y ago

SamBam 1y ago
I think the implication is that to be interesting you need to write from an individual's standpoint. That's why fiction written by LLMs sounds so boring (at least right now): because you can't amalgamate all the text in the world and not sound like an average. > ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’ Pretty great line.
wjnc 1y ago
People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.
hydrogen7800 1y ago
Not really on the topic of the FA, but I've heard a few times about the All Souls Exams and seen some sample essay prompts, and I would love to read some real essays written by test takers. Any pointers?
- decimalenough 1y ago
  They're written in pencil and not returned, so nobody (except All Souls staff) has access to them.
- wheelinsupial 1y ago
  The list of exam fellows can be found online [1]. Probably their research or any personal blogs would be the closest you can find. [1] https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people
andyjohnson0 1y ago
> The ultimate example may be All Souls College, which has a ritual, the Mallard Song, that occurs once a century. You can't walk for more than five minutes in the UK without tripping over some nonsense like this. History is very important, and traditon has its place, but really? As a brit I find it all kind of tediously performative sometimes.
- xg15 1y ago
  Not a Brit, but Terry Pratchett's ritual of the Other Jacket told me all I need to know. https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-gone-off-the-deep-end https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-go...
  - andyjohnson0 1y ago
    > Here is an example of how mindless adherence to tradition can get a bit weird and very funny See also; the King's Remembrancer and the Quit Rent Ceremony and the Trial of the Pyx: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer It is truly strange how my country can create a political and cultural operating system that allows this stuff to just go on and on for almost 800 years, right up to now.
    - xg15 1y ago
      > The King's Remembrancer swears in a jury of 26 Goldsmiths who then count, weigh and otherwise measure a sample of 88,000 gold coins produced by the Royal Mint. I mean, you have to admire the stamina for that.
  - scubbo 1y ago
    a) GNU Terry Pratchett b) In case you are one of today's Lucky Ten Thousand, this is a reference to the real-life Ceremony Of The Keys[1] [0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1] https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/the-ceremony-of-the-keys/ https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...
    - xg15 1y ago
      GNU Terry Pratchett And yeah, I knew about the Ceremony of the Keys, but not the details. Didn't know it really has that kind of scripted dialogue that Pratchett parodied there.
_hark 1y ago
I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_souls_exam_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so... * Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lordnacho 1y ago
I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not? I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original? As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for. Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do. Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.
- dash2 1y ago
  OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode: https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457a4 https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457... It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got: https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c34662d https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466... which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points. For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores": https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms-ice-cores-and-nuns-teeth-inside-the-new-science-of-history https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms... It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.
autelius 1y ago
Past exams: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers
- hyperman1 1y ago
  It would be interesting to see all answers for one of these side by side. I would probably start nodding in agreement with one, only for the next one to go on a completely different tangent, focussing on other values, which I als would have to agree with.
munchler 1y ago
A few years ago, the Turing Test was universally seen as sufficient for identifying intelligence. Now we’re scouring the planet for obscure tests to make us feel superior again. One can argue that the Turing Test was not actually adequate for this purpose, but we should at least admit how far we have shifted the goalposts since then.
- altruios 1y ago
  I have trouble reconciling this point with the known phenomenon of hallucinations. I would suppose the correct test is an 'infinite' Turing test, which after a long enough conversation, LLM's invariably do not pass, as they eventually degrade. I think a better measure for the binary answer of "have they passed the Turing test?" is the metric of 'For how long do they continue to pass the Turing test?"... This ignores such ideas of probing the LLM's weak spots. Since they do not 'see' their input as characters, and instead as tokens, counting letters in words, or specifics about those sub-token division provides a shortcut (for now) to failing the Turing test. But the above approach is not in the spirit of the Turing test, as that only points out a blind spot in their perception, like how a human would have to guess a bit at what things would look like if UV and infrared were added to our visual field... sure we could reason about it, but we wouldn't actually perceive those wavelengths, so we could make mistakes about that qualia. And it would say nothing of our ability to think if we could not perceive those wavelengths, even if 'more-seeing' entities judged us as inferior for it...
  - throwawaylaptop 1y ago
    I date a lot of public school teachers for some reason (hey, once you have a niche it's easy to relate and they like you), and I assure you you'd have a better more human conversation with an LLM than with most middle school teachers.
- rurp 1y ago
  I think the article gives a much more plausible explanation for the demise of the Turing Test: the jagged frontier. In the past being able to write convincingly well seemed like a good overall proxy for cognitive ability. It turns out LLMs are excellent at spitting out reasonable sounding text, and great at producing certain types of writing, but are still terrible at many writing tasks that rely on cognitive ability. Humans don't need to cast about for obscure cases where they are smarter than an LLM, there are an endless supply of examples. It's simply the case that the Turing Test tells us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current AI capabilities.
dmurray 1y ago
The LLM examples for "Water" surely put it in the top 10% of people (let's say, of adult native English speakers who are literate by UNESCO standards). The average person can't string two written sentences together, never mind write a coherent essay "from an opinionated, individual point of view" in a single draft. That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort. But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.
andy99 1y ago
This was good, the tldr point is LLMs suck at natural writing, particularly long form. Or more abstractly they don't have complex original ideas, so can't do anything that requires this. It's not surprising as it's very hard to train for or benchmark. Also should add I don't think anyone serious thinks that long form writing or ideation is what they're for - assuming an LLM would be good at this is a side effect of anthropomorphism / confusion. It doesn't mean an LLM isn't good at summarizing something or changing unstructured data into structured or all of the other "cognitive tasks" that we expect from AI.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  I suspect that gpt 6 will write great diverse essays when prompted with single words, ace specifically this benchmark, and piss people off when they upgrade siri to got 6, say “time?” to their smartwatch, and get a 3600 word eloquent response.
viccis 1y ago
The author seems impressed with Claude's job answering the Achaemenid Persia question, but, just taking a look at it, if I had started a conclusion paragraph with "In conclusion," in my more rigorous university courses, I'd have been pilloried for it.
- archaeans 1y ago
  The essay is just bad. Its answer to "How important were the Achaemenids as a template for Sasanian power?" is "very important" and proceeds to squeeze that from the analysis at any costs. There is no nuance, no balance, just hammering on the point that it was very important. Take this passage for example: "The importance of the Achaemenid model for Sasanian power was profound yet selective, manifesting most clearly in royal ideology, administrative structures, and religious policy, while being mediated through the complex filters of historical memory, practical necessity, and contemporary innovation." This is nonsense. "Profound yet selective" what does that even mean? Was it profound or selective? Another problematic passage: "Ardashir's son Shapur I's Res Gestae (ŠKZ) explicitly invokes the memory of past Iranian greatness, presenting the Sasanian dynasty as restoring a glory that had been diminished under Parthian rule." It most certainly does not. There is no such claim to "restoring" something the Parthian rule had "diminished". As usual, LLMs can write very convincing nonsense if you don't or can't scrutinize. This is bad historical analysis dressed up as a pompous essay that looks knowledgeable to the lay person.
roxolotl 1y ago
> The same patterns emerge for all LLM answers to these questions. They converge on an optimal path through a thicket of concepts. This so concisely explains most of the problems and power of these tools. If your goal is to get a reasonably good answer on a reasonably well trod subject you’re going to be very happy with their output. If you push them outside of that they quickly fall into either producing reasonable sounding but incorrect outputs, hallucinations, or failure.
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  Considering a common trope is that most people are barely skilled at their main profession these days and almost clueless at everything else.. is this really that bad? Most people need help with things that are trivial to experienced people in that field, but don't have the access or time or funds to get experts. Most Americans can barely understand fractions and have no idea how a refrigerator works. If LLMs can help them troubleshoot their fridge and find out it's probably the circulating fan that needs help because their freezer works but not their fridge, isnt that mission accomplished, even if an HVAC tech can't use it to solve all his problems yet?
  - drewbeck 1y ago
    It depends what you want LLMs for, or what you think they should be for. Imo you’re correct that they’re good enough if you scope your expectations appropriately. The problem is that the LLMs themselves don’t have any concept of their own limitations, leading to a kind of expectation creep. “Hey the bot was pretty good at helping me troubleshoot my fridge, lemme ask it for the names of the first 12 presidents I’m sure it’ll get that right.” I think expectations and failure states for humans are far far easier to understand and suss out than for LLMs, and this is one of the robots’ biggest problems.
deleted 1y ago
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curtisszmania 1y ago
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84 points by benbreen 1y ago

I think the implication is that to be interesting you need to write from an individual's standpoint. That's why fiction written by LLMs sounds so boring (at least right now): because you can't amalgamate all the text in the world and not sound like an average. > ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’ Pretty great line.

wjnc 1y ago

People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.

hydrogen7800 1y ago

Not really on the topic of the FA, but I've heard a few times about the All Souls Exams and seen some sample essay prompts, and I would love to read some real essays written by test takers. Any pointers?

decimalenough 1y ago
They're written in pencil and not returned, so nobody (except All Souls staff) has access to them.
wheelinsupial 1y ago
The list of exam fellows can be found online [1]. Probably their research or any personal blogs would be the closest you can find. [1] https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people

andyjohnson0 1y ago

> The ultimate example may be All Souls College, which has a ritual, the Mallard Song, that occurs once a century. You can't walk for more than five minutes in the UK without tripping over some nonsense like this. History is very important, and traditon has its place, but really? As a brit I find it all kind of tediously performative sometimes.

xg15 1y ago
Not a Brit, but Terry Pratchett's ritual of the Other Jacket told me all I need to know. https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-gone-off-the-deep-end https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-go...
- andyjohnson0 1y ago
  > Here is an example of how mindless adherence to tradition can get a bit weird and very funny See also; the King's Remembrancer and the Quit Rent Ceremony and the Trial of the Pyx: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer It is truly strange how my country can create a political and cultural operating system that allows this stuff to just go on and on for almost 800 years, right up to now.
  - xg15 1y ago
    > The King's Remembrancer swears in a jury of 26 Goldsmiths who then count, weigh and otherwise measure a sample of 88,000 gold coins produced by the Royal Mint. I mean, you have to admire the stamina for that.
- scubbo 1y ago
  a) GNU Terry Pratchett b) In case you are one of today's Lucky Ten Thousand, this is a reference to the real-life Ceremony Of The Keys[1] [0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1] https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/the-ceremony-of-the-keys/ https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...
  - xg15 1y ago
    GNU Terry Pratchett And yeah, I knew about the Ceremony of the Keys, but not the details. Didn't know it really has that kind of scripted dialogue that Pratchett parodied there.

_hark 1y ago

I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_souls_exam_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so... * Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

lordnacho 1y ago

I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not? I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original? As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for. Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do. Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.

dash2 1y ago
OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode: https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457a4 https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457... It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got: https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c34662d https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466... which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points. For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores": https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms-ice-cores-and-nuns-teeth-inside-the-new-science-of-history https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms... It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.

autelius 1y ago

Past exams: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers

hyperman1 1y ago
It would be interesting to see all answers for one of these side by side. I would probably start nodding in agreement with one, only for the next one to go on a completely different tangent, focussing on other values, which I als would have to agree with.

munchler 1y ago

A few years ago, the Turing Test was universally seen as sufficient for identifying intelligence. Now we’re scouring the planet for obscure tests to make us feel superior again. One can argue that the Turing Test was not actually adequate for this purpose, but we should at least admit how far we have shifted the goalposts since then.

altruios 1y ago
I have trouble reconciling this point with the known phenomenon of hallucinations. I would suppose the correct test is an 'infinite' Turing test, which after a long enough conversation, LLM's invariably do not pass, as they eventually degrade. I think a better measure for the binary answer of "have they passed the Turing test?" is the metric of 'For how long do they continue to pass the Turing test?"... This ignores such ideas of probing the LLM's weak spots. Since they do not 'see' their input as characters, and instead as tokens, counting letters in words, or specifics about those sub-token division provides a shortcut (for now) to failing the Turing test. But the above approach is not in the spirit of the Turing test, as that only points out a blind spot in their perception, like how a human would have to guess a bit at what things would look like if UV and infrared were added to our visual field... sure we could reason about it, but we wouldn't actually perceive those wavelengths, so we could make mistakes about that qualia. And it would say nothing of our ability to think if we could not perceive those wavelengths, even if 'more-seeing' entities judged us as inferior for it...
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  I date a lot of public school teachers for some reason (hey, once you have a niche it's easy to relate and they like you), and I assure you you'd have a better more human conversation with an LLM than with most middle school teachers.
rurp 1y ago
I think the article gives a much more plausible explanation for the demise of the Turing Test: the jagged frontier. In the past being able to write convincingly well seemed like a good overall proxy for cognitive ability. It turns out LLMs are excellent at spitting out reasonable sounding text, and great at producing certain types of writing, but are still terrible at many writing tasks that rely on cognitive ability. Humans don't need to cast about for obscure cases where they are smarter than an LLM, there are an endless supply of examples. It's simply the case that the Turing Test tells us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current AI capabilities.

dmurray 1y ago

The LLM examples for "Water" surely put it in the top 10% of people (let's say, of adult native English speakers who are literate by UNESCO standards). The average person can't string two written sentences together, never mind write a coherent essay "from an opinionated, individual point of view" in a single draft. That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort. But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.

andy99 1y ago

This was good, the tldr point is LLMs suck at natural writing, particularly long form. Or more abstractly they don't have complex original ideas, so can't do anything that requires this. It's not surprising as it's very hard to train for or benchmark. Also should add I don't think anyone serious thinks that long form writing or ideation is what they're for - assuming an LLM would be good at this is a side effect of anthropomorphism / confusion. It doesn't mean an LLM isn't good at summarizing something or changing unstructured data into structured or all of the other "cognitive tasks" that we expect from AI.

QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
I suspect that gpt 6 will write great diverse essays when prompted with single words, ace specifically this benchmark, and piss people off when they upgrade siri to got 6, say “time?” to their smartwatch, and get a 3600 word eloquent response.

viccis 1y ago

The author seems impressed with Claude's job answering the Achaemenid Persia question, but, just taking a look at it, if I had started a conclusion paragraph with "In conclusion," in my more rigorous university courses, I'd have been pilloried for it.

archaeans 1y ago
The essay is just bad. Its answer to "How important were the Achaemenids as a template for Sasanian power?" is "very important" and proceeds to squeeze that from the analysis at any costs. There is no nuance, no balance, just hammering on the point that it was very important. Take this passage for example: "The importance of the Achaemenid model for Sasanian power was profound yet selective, manifesting most clearly in royal ideology, administrative structures, and religious policy, while being mediated through the complex filters of historical memory, practical necessity, and contemporary innovation." This is nonsense. "Profound yet selective" what does that even mean? Was it profound or selective? Another problematic passage: "Ardashir's son Shapur I's Res Gestae (ŠKZ) explicitly invokes the memory of past Iranian greatness, presenting the Sasanian dynasty as restoring a glory that had been diminished under Parthian rule." It most certainly does not. There is no such claim to "restoring" something the Parthian rule had "diminished". As usual, LLMs can write very convincing nonsense if you don't or can't scrutinize. This is bad historical analysis dressed up as a pompous essay that looks knowledgeable to the lay person.

roxolotl 1y ago

> The same patterns emerge for all LLM answers to these questions. They converge on an optimal path through a thicket of concepts. This so concisely explains most of the problems and power of these tools. If your goal is to get a reasonably good answer on a reasonably well trod subject you’re going to be very happy with their output. If you push them outside of that they quickly fall into either producing reasonable sounding but incorrect outputs, hallucinations, or failure.

throwawaylaptop 1y ago
Considering a common trope is that most people are barely skilled at their main profession these days and almost clueless at everything else.. is this really that bad? Most people need help with things that are trivial to experienced people in that field, but don't have the access or time or funds to get experts. Most Americans can barely understand fractions and have no idea how a refrigerator works. If LLMs can help them troubleshoot their fridge and find out it's probably the circulating fan that needs help because their freezer works but not their fridge, isnt that mission accomplished, even if an HVAC tech can't use it to solve all his problems yet?
- drewbeck 1y ago
  It depends what you want LLMs for, or what you think they should be for. Imo you’re correct that they’re good enough if you scope your expectations appropriately. The problem is that the LLMs themselves don’t have any concept of their own limitations, leading to a kind of expectation creep. “Hey the bot was pretty good at helping me troubleshoot my fridge, lemme ask it for the names of the first 12 presidents I’m sure it’ll get that right.” I think expectations and failure states for humans are far far easier to understand and suss out than for LLMs, and this is one of the robots’ biggest problems.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

curtisszmania 1y ago

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