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that's because a next token predictor can't "forget" context. That's just not how it works. You load the thing up with relevant context and pray that it guides
by dingnuts 1y ago
that's because a next token predictor can't "forget" context. That's just not how it works.
You load the thing up with relevant context and pray that it guides the generation path to the part of the model that represents the information you want and pray that the path of tokens through the model outputs what you want
That's why they have a tendency to go ahead and do things you tell them not to do..
also IDK about you but I hate how much praying has become part of the state of the art here. I didn't get into this career to be a fucking tech priest for the machine god. I will never like these models until they are predictable, which means I will never like them.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoYou can rewrite the history (but there are issues with that too). So an agent can forget context. Simply dont feed in part of the context on the next run.
- dragonwriter 1y agoThis is where the distinction between “an LLM” and “a user-facing system backed by an LLM” becomes important; the latter is often much more than a naive system for maintaining history and reprompting the LLM with added context from new user input, and could absolutely incorporate a step which (using the same LLM with different prompting or completely different tooling) edited the context before presenting it to the LLM to generate the response to the user. And such a system could, by that mechanism, “forget” selected context in the process.
- yggdrasil_ai 1y agoI have been building Yggdrasil for that exact purpose - https://github.com/zayr0-9/Yggdrasil https://github.com/zayr0-9/Yggdrasil
- PantaloonFlames 1y agoAt least a few of the current coding agents have mechanisms that do what you describe.
- davedx 1y agoYeah I start a new session to mitigate this. Don’t keep hammering away - close the current chat/session whatever and restate the problem carefully in a new one.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoThere should be a simple button that allows you refine the context. A fresh LLM could generate a new context from the input and outputs of the chat history, then another fresh LLM can start over with that context.
- adastra22 1y ago/compact in Claude Code.
- pulvinar 1y agoIt's easy to miss: ChatGPT now has a "branch to new chat" option to branch off from any reply.
- PantaloonFlames 1y agoYou are saying “fresh LLM” but really I think you’re referring to a curated context. The existing coding agents have mechanisms to do this. Saving context to a file. Editing the file. Clearing all context except for the file. It’s sort of clunky now but it will get better and slicker.
- 1y ago
- moffkalast 1y agoThat's not how attention works though, it should be perfectly able to figure out which parts are important and which aren't, but the problem is that it doesn't really scale beyond small contexts and works on a token to token basis instead of being hierarchical with sentences, paragraphs and sections. The only models that actually do long context do so by skipping attention layers or doing something without attention or without positional encodings, all leading to shit performance. Nobody pretrains on more than like 8k, except maybe Google who can throw TPUs at the problem.
- jofla_net 1y agoRelax friend! I can't see why you'd be peeved in the slightest! Remember, the CEOs have it all figured out and have 'determined' that we don't need all those eyeballs on the code anymore. You can simply 'feed' the machine and do the work of forty devs! This is the new engineering! /s
- keeda 1y ago> I didn't get into this career to be a fucking tech priest for the machine god. You may appreciate this illustration I made (largely with AI, of course): https://imgur.com/a/0QV5mkS https://imgur.com/a/0QV5mkS The context (heheheh) is a long-ass article on coding with AI I wrote eons ago that nobody ever read, if anybody is curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40443374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40443374 Looking back at it, I was off on a few predictions but a number of them are coming true.
- spyder 1y agoThis is false: "that's because a next token predictor can't "forget" context. That's just not how it works." An LSTM is also a next token predictor and literally have a forget gate, and there are many other context compressing models too which remember only the what it thinks is important and forgets the less important, like for example: state-space models or RWKV that work well as LLMs too. But even just a the basic GPT model forgets old context since it's gets truncated if it cannot fit, but that's not really the learned smart forgetting the other models do.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1y agoWell, "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". It's just that it is same in a bad way, not a good way.