4 ms·

You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may

You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.

j_maffe 8mo ago
Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.
- dxdm 8mo ago
  Wouldn't that be nice. I've been party and witness to enough misunderstandings to know that this is far from universally true, even for people like me who are more primed than average to spot missing context.
  - j_maffe 8mo ago
    I never said it's universally true.
- mlrtime 8mo ago
  TIL my wife may be AI!
londons_explore 8mo ago
This is why we fed it the whole internet and every library as training data... By now it should know this stuff.
- jasongi 8mo ago
  Future models know it now, assuming they suck in mastodon and/or hacker news. Although I don't think they actually "know" it. This particular trick question will be in the bank just like the seahorse emoji or how many Rs in strawberry. Did they start reasoning and generalising better or did the publishing of the "trick" and the discourse around it paper over the gap? I wonder if in the future we will trade these AI tells like 0days, keeping them secret so they don't get patched out at the next model update.
  - Filligree 8mo ago
    The answer can be “both”. They won’t get this specific question wrong again; but also they generalise, once they have sufficient examples. Patching out a single failure doesn’t do it. Patch out ten equivalent ones, and the eleventh doesn’t happen.
    - MadxX79 8mo ago
      Yeah, the interpolation works if there are enough close examples around it. Problem is that the dimensionality of the space you are trying to interpolate in is so incomprehensibly big that even training on all of the internet, you are always going to have stuff that just doesn't have samples close by.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  Even I don’t “know” how many “R”s there are in “strawberry”. I don’t keep that information in my brain. What I do keep is the spelling of the word “strawberry” and the skill of being able to count so that I can derive the answer to that question anytime I need.
  - prmoustache 8mo ago
    For many words I can't say the number of each letters but I only have an abstract memory of how they look so when I write say "strawbery" I just realize it looks odd and correct it.
  - Windchaser 8mo ago
    Right. The equivalent here, for this problem, would be something like asking for context. And the LLM response should've been: "Well, you need your car to be at the car wash in order to wash it, right?"
jstummbillig 8mo ago
People poorly specifying problems and having bad models of what the other party can know (and then being surprised by the outcome) is certainly a more general albeit mostly separate issue.
- ahofmann 8mo ago
  This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer. The main goal of ai seems to get into this space and make a lot of people superflous and this also (partly) explains why everyone is pouring this amount of money into ai.
  - PaulRobinson 8mo ago
    Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist. It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software? LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler
    - Scarblac 8mo ago
      I disagree, I feel (experienced) developers are excellent at this. It's always about translating between our own domain and the customer's, and every other new project there's a new domain to get up to speed with in enough detail to understand what to build. What other professions do that? That's why I'm somewhat scared of AIs - they know like 80% of the domain knowledge in any domain.
jiggawatts 8mo ago
I regularly tell new people at work to be extremely careful when making requests through the service desk — manned entirely by humans — because the experience is akin to making a wish from an evil genie. You will get exactly what you asked for, not what you wanted… probably. (Random occurrences are always a possibility.) E.g.: I may ask someone to submit a ticket to “extend my account expiry”. They’ll submit: “Unlock Jiggawatts’ account” The service desk will reset my password (and neglect to tell me), leaving my expired account locked out in multiple orthogonal ways. That’s on a good day. Last week they created Jiggawatts2. The AIs have got to be better than this, surely! I suspect they already are. People are testing them with trick questions while the human examiner is on edge, aware of and looking for the twist. Meanwhile ordinary people struggle with concepts like “forward my email verbatim instead of creatively rephrasing it to what you incorrectly though it must have really meant.”
- scott_w 8mo ago
  There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. However, we would want our tools to be more useful than the dumbest humans...
scott_w 8mo ago
> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?
- pickleRick243 8mo ago
  But also why would you ask whether you should walk or drive if the car is at home? Either way the answer is obvious, and there is no way to interpret it except as a trick question. Of course, the parsimonious assumption is that the car is at home so assuming that the car is at the car wash is a questionable choice to say the least (otherwise there would be 2 cars in the situation, which the question doesn't mention).
  - scott_w 8mo ago
    But you're ascribing understanding to the LLM, which is not what it's doing. If the LLM understood you, it would realise it's a trick question and, assuming it was British, reply with "You'd drive it because how else would you get it to the car wash you absolute tit." Even the higher level reasoning, while answering the question correctly, don't grasp the higher context that the question is obviously a trick question. They still answer earnestly. Granted, it is a tool that is doing what you want (answering a question) but let's not ascribe higher understanding than what is clearly observed - and also based on what we know about how LLMs work.
    - layer8 8mo ago
      > They still answer earnestly. Gemini at least is putting some snark into its response: “Unless you've mastered the art of carrying a 4,000-pound vehicle over your shoulder, you should definitely drive. While 150 feet is a very short walk, it's a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash!”
      - Barbing 8mo ago
kitd 8mo ago
Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Does that stat predate the modern digital age by a number of years?

j_maffe 8mo ago

Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.

dxdm 8mo ago
Wouldn't that be nice. I've been party and witness to enough misunderstandings to know that this is far from universally true, even for people like me who are more primed than average to spot missing context.
- j_maffe 8mo ago
  I never said it's universally true.
mlrtime 8mo ago
TIL my wife may be AI!

londons_explore 8mo ago

This is why we fed it the whole internet and every library as training data... By now it should know this stuff.

jasongi 8mo ago
Future models know it now, assuming they suck in mastodon and/or hacker news. Although I don't think they actually "know" it. This particular trick question will be in the bank just like the seahorse emoji or how many Rs in strawberry. Did they start reasoning and generalising better or did the publishing of the "trick" and the discourse around it paper over the gap? I wonder if in the future we will trade these AI tells like 0days, keeping them secret so they don't get patched out at the next model update.
- Filligree 8mo ago
  The answer can be “both”. They won’t get this specific question wrong again; but also they generalise, once they have sufficient examples. Patching out a single failure doesn’t do it. Patch out ten equivalent ones, and the eleventh doesn’t happen.
  - MadxX79 8mo ago
    Yeah, the interpolation works if there are enough close examples around it. Problem is that the dimensionality of the space you are trying to interpolate in is so incomprehensibly big that even training on all of the internet, you are always going to have stuff that just doesn't have samples close by.
nkrisc 8mo ago
Even I don’t “know” how many “R”s there are in “strawberry”. I don’t keep that information in my brain. What I do keep is the spelling of the word “strawberry” and the skill of being able to count so that I can derive the answer to that question anytime I need.
- prmoustache 8mo ago
  For many words I can't say the number of each letters but I only have an abstract memory of how they look so when I write say "strawbery" I just realize it looks odd and correct it.
- Windchaser 8mo ago
  Right. The equivalent here, for this problem, would be something like asking for context. And the LLM response should've been: "Well, you need your car to be at the car wash in order to wash it, right?"

jstummbillig 8mo ago

People poorly specifying problems and having bad models of what the other party can know (and then being surprised by the outcome) is certainly a more general albeit mostly separate issue.

ahofmann 8mo ago
This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer. The main goal of ai seems to get into this space and make a lot of people superflous and this also (partly) explains why everyone is pouring this amount of money into ai.
- PaulRobinson 8mo ago
  Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist. It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software? LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler
  - Scarblac 8mo ago
    I disagree, I feel (experienced) developers are excellent at this. It's always about translating between our own domain and the customer's, and every other new project there's a new domain to get up to speed with in enough detail to understand what to build. What other professions do that? That's why I'm somewhat scared of AIs - they know like 80% of the domain knowledge in any domain.

jiggawatts 8mo ago

I regularly tell new people at work to be extremely careful when making requests through the service desk — manned entirely by humans — because the experience is akin to making a wish from an evil genie. You will get exactly what you asked for, not what you wanted… probably. (Random occurrences are always a possibility.) E.g.: I may ask someone to submit a ticket to “extend my account expiry”. They’ll submit: “Unlock Jiggawatts’ account” The service desk will reset my password (and neglect to tell me), leaving my expired account locked out in multiple orthogonal ways. That’s on a good day. Last week they created Jiggawatts2. The AIs have got to be better than this, surely! I suspect they already are. People are testing them with trick questions while the human examiner is on edge, aware of and looking for the twist. Meanwhile ordinary people struggle with concepts like “forward my email verbatim instead of creatively rephrasing it to what you incorrectly though it must have really meant.”

scott_w 8mo ago
There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. However, we would want our tools to be more useful than the dumbest humans...

scott_w 8mo ago

> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?

pickleRick243 8mo ago
But also why would you ask whether you should walk or drive if the car is at home? Either way the answer is obvious, and there is no way to interpret it except as a trick question. Of course, the parsimonious assumption is that the car is at home so assuming that the car is at the car wash is a questionable choice to say the least (otherwise there would be 2 cars in the situation, which the question doesn't mention).
- scott_w 8mo ago
  But you're ascribing understanding to the LLM, which is not what it's doing. If the LLM understood you, it would realise it's a trick question and, assuming it was British, reply with "You'd drive it because how else would you get it to the car wash you absolute tit." Even the higher level reasoning, while answering the question correctly, don't grasp the higher context that the question is obviously a trick question. They still answer earnestly. Granted, it is a tool that is doing what you want (answering a question) but let's not ascribe higher understanding than what is clearly observed - and also based on what we know about how LLMs work.
  - layer8 8mo ago
    > They still answer earnestly. Gemini at least is putting some snark into its response: “Unless you've mastered the art of carrying a 4,000-pound vehicle over your shoulder, you should definitely drive. While 150 feet is a very short walk, it's a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash!”
    - Barbing 8mo ago

kitd 8mo ago

Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.

WarmWash 8mo ago
Does that stat predate the modern digital age by a number of years?