Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

aimodels.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 255 posts

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#111

Post by akoboldfrying »

notahacker wrote: post #85
akoboldfrying wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you test whether some arbitrary thing is simulating the human brain? If you have no answer, I put it to you that your assertion is of the no-true-Scotsman type -- that is, unfalsifiable.

Its not a no-true-Scotsman type argument in a world where the existence of Scotland itself is purely hypothetical, and the arguments for the possibility of its existence in the form of a working bagpipe demonstrator are also an illustration that you don't need to be Scottish to play bagpipes. The impossibility of testing whether the brain is adequately simulated (since a pretty basic LLM that makes no attempt to simu…

I had to apply some serious analogy-algebra, but I think your first paragraph is equating Scotland to intelligence -- rather than to the human brain specifically, which is the argument GP and I are having. The human brain is not hypothetical, and despite it being outside the realms of today's technology, it's likely that one day it will be possible to simulate one. At that time it will be possible to gauge whether today's LLMs are accurate approximations.

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#112

Post by l5870uoo9y »

Quickly gave it a try for generating a SQL query for PostgreSQL using the dvdrental database[1]. When asking AI to generate:

> find customers who didn't rent a movie in the last 12 months but rented a movie in the 12 months before that

It will a SQL query using a "HAVING" clause which is suboptimal[2].

When adding (it is very important that this is correct) after the instructions it does produce better SQL. Asking it to:

> find customers who didn't rent a movie in the last 12 months but rented a movie in the 12 months before that (it is very important that this is correct)

Will skip using "HAVING" and instead rely only on "WHERE" clauses[3]. Not rocket science but interesting. My gut feeling would be that when stressing importance AI will tent to "match" and "autocomplete" from texts where this concern was stated and thus generating better SQL queries.

[1]: https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-getting-starte...

[2]: https://www.sqlai.ai/snippets/clojyqqrr0004l50fp3w7jkci

[3]: https://www.sqlai.ai/snippets/clojyr3zc0006l50ftpxgsmg0

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#113

Post by atodorov99 »

visarga wrote: post #10
stylepoints wrote: post #8

> When we tell AI that we're relying heavily on its answers, it "doubles down" to provide us with more precise, thoughtful, and thorough responses. The AI isn't actually feeling the pressure If it quacks like a duck...

There is an alternative explanation - both AI and humans piggyback on language. Language patterns encode and express all the emotions, and they have been created by evolution. We are, much like LLMs, contextual language generators Language is our repository for both intelligence and emotion, it has its own evolution and replicates faster than biology. I don't pin AI abilities to the models, but to the datasets they a…

Humans don't piggyback on language (assuming you mean) for intelligence and emotions. Emotions predate language by miles and they don't even have to be consciously thought of, much less expressed through language. Doubly so for people who do not have an inner voice and do not even use a language to think. Body language exists as the simplest example of this.

As for intelligence I honestly believe the mind uses whatever tools it sees fit for a task. Sometimes when you think about a problem it is through words, sometimes it is through visuals and sometimes it is just felt.

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#114

Post by Last5Digits »

intended wrote: post #105
Last5Digits wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what makes these discussions so infuriating. Saying that LLMs "just predict the next word" is about as insightful as saying that computers "just do a bunch of logical operations" - neither point constraints the possible capabilities of the systems they refer to in any meaningful way.

If you look at the comment, it’s not just “LLMs predict the next token.” It is that people have forgotten that it’s just “predict the next token.” Right now it’s like people saw a 486 processor and started thinking it was a brain.

Your comment literally reads: "LLMs predict words. Any semantic validity is a side effect of enough training data reinforcing the close correlation of those tokens."

How am I supposed to interpret this any other way? If your claim is that LLMs currently do not possess the same generalization ability as humans, then no one here would disagree with you. But you went way further by claiming that only close correlations were being considered and that semantic validity was simply accidental. Semantic validity is the norm for GPT3/4, finding failures of generalization three or four steps of inference removed from its training domain is not sufficient to make a grand claim like yours.

In fact, you wrote multiple comments with claims like that LLMs are "super advanced lorem ipsum." and "Word predictors not world state predictors". Each of these claims has been dis-proven multiple times, unless you want to set the bar for world modeling at perfect generalization over all domains of computation. A bar that no system, including humans, would pass.

To stay with the computer analogy: Imagine that same 486 processor not being able to solve a very complex SAT problem before the end of the universe and then denying the Turing-completeness of said processor based on that failure. (In conjunction with memory)

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#115

Post by mo_42 »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #53
Matumio wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't ever simulate the human brain. It may simulate human cultural knowledge, or emotions, but only as far as they are encoded in the current millennium's written knowledge. The human brain doesn't even have the concept of written language, that's all culturally learned knowledge.

How would you test whether some arbitrary thing is simulating the human brain? If you have no answer, I put it to you that your assertion is of the no-true-Scotsman type -- that is, unfalsifiable.

> How would you test whether some arbitrary thing is simulating the human brain?

In my first comment, I didn't claim that it's simulating the entire human brain but aspects of it like language and memory.

We can test such aspects by throwing text at the model and comparing it to responses of humans. A simulation doesn't need to have the same abstractions. What counts is solely the quality of the response. If the responses are sufficiently close to those of humans, I'd say it's simulating a human brain.

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#116

Post by famouswaffles »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #112

Quickly gave it a try for generating a SQL query for PostgreSQL using the dvdrental database[1]. When asking AI to generate: > find customers who didn't rent a movie in the last 12 months but rented a movie in the 12 months before that It will a SQL query using a "HAVING" clause which is suboptimal[2]. When adding (it is very important that this is correct) after the instructions it does produce better SQL. Asking it…

LLMs are not lookup tables. They aren't "matching" in that way.

There's this idea of "supercharged interpolation", the idea that they just take out certain texts and switch out words or whatever, that is not true.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#117

Post by notahacker »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #111
notahacker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a no-true-Scotsman type argument in a world where the existence of Scotland itself is purely hypothetical, and the arguments for the possibility of its existence in the form of a working bagpipe demonstrator are also an illustration that you don't need to be Scottish to play bagpipes. The impossibility of testing whether the brain is adequately simulated (since a pretty basic LLM that makes no attempt to simu…

I had to apply some serious analogy-algebra, but I think your first paragraph is equating Scotland to intelligence -- rather than to the human brain specifically, which is the argument GP and I are having. The human brain is not hypothetical, and despite it being outside the realms of today's technology, it's likely that one day it will be possible to simulate one. At that time it will be possible to gauge whether to…

No, my first paragraph sidesteps messy debate about what intelligence is and focuses on the simple fact a human brain simulation exists purely in the realms of the hypothetical.

Its not the no true Scotsman fallacy unless the Scotsman actually exists.

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#118

Post by [deleted] »

williamcotton wrote: post #110
mjburgess wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "emergent phenomena" the pattern described is just the same as when you add +b to an ax+b model of linear data. ie., it's just fitting capacity. The "emergent boundary" is just an empirical measure of the necessary fitting capacity of these models on "everything ever digitised in english" given any particular functional requirement. All the language around this area is not scientific, nor are these practi…

Well hurry up and get your paper published because if you've cracked the code on emergent abilities the world is looking for answers!

[deleted]

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#119

Post by somewhereoutth »

intended wrote: post #19

I think this is the entry point needed to get peoples attention and explain: LLMs aren’t people, and emergent properties are being over extended. If LLMs are showing “better” performance when there are tokens that humans read as emotionally salient - Then the underlying text it’s trained on shows humans give better answers when emotionally salient context is provided. LLMs predict words. Any semantic validity is a si…

> production tools are semantic time bombs

Yeah imagine a spreadsheet that occasionally but fairly regularly made 2 + 2 = 5

Re: Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance

#120

Post by JohnAaronNelson »

mjburgess wrote: post #102
Last5Digits wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what makes these discussions so infuriating. Saying that LLMs "just predict the next word" is about as insightful as saying that computers "just do a bunch of logical operations" - neither point constraints the possible capabilities of the systems they refer to in any meaningful way.

Sure it does. It perfectly deliniates it. LLMs are not: sensitive to causal structure, dynamically adapting to environmental changes, growing, developing sensory-motor capacities, they are not with us in our environment, they are not: expressing desires, preferences, intentions, beliefs, motivations, etc. And so on. To say, "they just predict the next word" is literally to say that all apparent functions of an LLM ar…

What if humans’ responses are merely probabilistically consistent with a history of sensory experiences? Would this change the significance of human emotions vs apparent emergent emotional responses from LLMs?
Post reply on HN