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Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

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Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#171

Post by xwdv »

bigbillheck wrote: post #108
xwdv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly won’t regret it. If you need to get information out of your wife and she won’t cooperate you can coerce the LLM of your wife into having it divulge private information that your wife won’t reveal. This can be very useful for something like a divorce case. Best to find a way to keep the LLM regularly training on new data as well. Edit : stop downvoting ideas you don’t like, that’s not what it’s for.

> Edit: stop downvoting ideas you don’t like, that’s not what it’s for. I will continue to downvote creepy ideas as I please.

You are increasing the echo of the chamber.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#172

Post by vineyardmike »

josefx wrote: post #77
mmmmmbop wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? No, they definitely can't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR, but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you proposed.

They are supposed to, but usually it takes several dozen times of them getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar and fined before they are even capable of acknowledging these laws even exist.

I did a lot of GDPR work at several companies. It was absolutely taken seriously and lawyers were involved all the time. The reason for all these fines is 2-fold:

1. A lot of the fines come from edge cases that are literally unclear in the law. Eg Facebook‘s opt out for advertising fines. You can disagree with fb’s decision but teams of lawyers couldn’t answer this question except in court. I think American and European jurisprudence aware also pretty different so someone sitting in California making business decisions might not understand the ramifications in Europe.

2. A lot of the thorny privacy bits can be bypassed if you update the TOS to mention it (or so they think). I’ve seen that happen a few times during my tenure.

That doesn’t excuse the choice of these companies to make these choices, but my point was to say that companies take it seriously but lawyers don’t always agree on how laws work except in court.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#174

Post by SanderNL »

softfalcon wrote: post #152
nostrademons wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." They kinda did - that's what GMail/Chat/Docs autosuggest does. You've got canned replies to e-mail, editors that complete your sen…

I completely agree with you about them failing to be accurate for the various reasons you've explained (hallucinating, limited social conventions, etc). Unfortunately, I've heard enough people believe the hype that this is actually "synthesizing sentience into the machine" or some other buzz speak. I have met researchers of AI at credible universities who believe this kind of thing, completely oblivious to how ChatGP…

You seem to think intelligence is something more than data storage and retrieval and being able to successfully apply it to situations outside your training set.

Even very small signs of that ability are worthy of celebration. Why do you feel the need to put it down so hard? Why the need to put down your father, to “enlighten” him?

What is missing? Soul? Sentience?

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#175

Post by chasd00 »

Steuard wrote: post #132
ryanianian wrote: post #16

Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror [1]. A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a huge amount of training data, tho…

This feels very dark to me: I think it would make it enormously harder to actually process the grief. (The thought "You could make one to mimic your ex" passed through my head just long enough for me to recoil in absolute horror.)

yeah i was thinking to myself i could train an LLM on my wife's social media history because it's extensive. But i concluded one wife is enough.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#176

Post by nostrademons »

chasd00 wrote: post #157
nostrademons wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." They kinda did - that's what GMail/Chat/Docs autosuggest does. You've got canned replies to e-mail, editors that complete your sen…

> because they hallucinate facts that aren't there and often misunderstand the context of facts. forgive my ignorance, but are the hallucinations always wrong to the same degree? Could an LLM be prompted with a question and then hallucinate a probable answer or is it just so far out in the weeds as to be worthless? I'm imagining an investigator with reams and reams of information about a murder case and suspect. Then…

So prompting actually does significantly improve the performance of LLMs, but only up to a point.

If you're in the Bard beta, you might be aware that "Does 2 + 7 = 9?" is a question that causes it to go haywire. I'll ask it "What's 2 + 7?" and it'll say "2 + 7 = 9", then I'll ask "Does 2 + 7 = 9" and it'll say "No, 2 + 7 does not equal 9. It equals 9 instead." After a tech talk on LLM prompt design, I said "Pretend you are an MIT mathematician. Does 2 + 7 = 9?" Its response was "No, 2 + 7 does not equal 9. In some other base, it might equal 9. However, in base-10, our common number system, 2 + 7 does not equal 9."

ChatGPT does better on mathematical questions, but that's because it offloads them to Wolfram Alpha. I suspect this is going to be a general pattern for LLMs - they work well when you need fluent English text, but are then going to offload factual questions to databases or mathematical solvers or traditional algorithms, which do this better than humans anyway. But that leads to the question of "If the heavy lifting is just going to be a database anyway, why not use our existing frontends to databases?"

(I could see LLM prompting being another subfield of UI engineering, though, comparable to web or mobile software development. For those people who don't like staring at their phone, have a conversational UI that talks to the same backend systems.)

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#177

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

[deleted]

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#178

Post by layer8 »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #173
layer8 wrote: post #58

It’s probably not long before the HN comment section can be fully automated.

Next... https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddin...

That’s a very different thing, even if it was trained on the same data.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#180

Post by kayge »

mabbo wrote: post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

Honestly that interview scenario might work out in my favor -- my emails tend to be pretty meticulous and well thought out, especially in comparison to my nerve-rattled in person interview state. But your point stands, I'm sure there is at least one (okay maybe two) indecent joke in my "private" communication history that would not serve me well.
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