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A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

edwarddonner.com

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#111

We need to learn to let go. Chatting with a deceased loved one is basically equivalent to the ressurection stone in Harry Potter. A faint reflection which will drive people to insanity. This is not healthy at all.

I feel similarly. It’s emotionally dangerous because obviously we miss our loved ones. And hearing their voice or feeling a simulacrum of talking to them is probably comforting in some way.

But it’s ultimately hollow. And can’t really answer anything new other than what’s sent into the training. Or, perhaps more dangerously, the simulation may hallucinate things that don’t exist and confuse people. (Eg, “I loved your sister more than you.” Or “I once had an affair in Paris”)

I think what’s more tricky is after a breakup, training a bot in the ex’s chat history to simulate your ex and continuing on with “good morning/good night” chitchat. That probably really messes with people but will be chosen over the pain of rejection. I’m not sure how many messages are really needed, but it’s pretty easy to collect a few thousand texts over a short period of time.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#112
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

> it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one. Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading…

I had a loved one die and I had a few saved voicemails. I would listen to them a few times a month for years and years. I only stopped because a particular phone upgrade lost them.

I don’t know if it was healthy, but I did it and I liked it when I did. It made me sad to do it, but I continued.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet? I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.

I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot. What I…

> I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular.

I think it will end up just being boring. The sad reality is that no one really wants to talk to us, except for a few who are amazing poets or something.

I think what’s more likely is to train models on all material created and ask useful questions for purposes of probate (“when did you buy the house”) because its faster and cheaper than manual research. Or maybe for family history summaries (“how many cousins lived in Colorado in the 1990s and moved to Iowa?”)

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#114
post #95
post #86

This post motivated me to do the same thing on my imessage data. I used GPT-3.5 for fine-tuning (and haha GPT-4 to help me build it :D). I guess, I should run fine-tuning jobs to create instances of my correspondence partners? Since, for the first system prompt I tell the model to pretend to be me, but on other fine-tuning attempts I can reverse the input and output, and then tell the model to "pretend" to be my coun…

This is a lot more risky than doing it on a self-hosted model surely? Do you really want to upload your entire message history to a third party (i.e. not Apple)?

This.

I assume OpenAI is using all of our input to create digital twins of all users for purposes of marketing. And they’re probably better at it than I.

So I might get a chatbot and OpenAI gets a marketing bot that fine tunes ads based on emotional state.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the casino I used to run, I started a pilot program with a homemade poker bot (labeled as such, and only deployed on poker tables labeled as "bot friendly"). The bot had no set model of its own. It was designed to mimic specific players on the casino, regulars who had played 10,000+ hands and who agreed to have their history cloned, by ingesting their entire hand/betting history and looking for what they had done…

"On the casino I used to run"? That might be the most casual intro to what sounds like a fascinating corner of the internet I never experienced. Do you have any other interesting stories or references to that time of your life?

[deleted]

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#116
People keep mentioning science fiction that this type of thing has been done in. Quick reminder since no one actually watched Caprica that this is how the Cylons started. Daughter of a dude who made a digital scanning technology to create VR avatars makes it better and her avatar becomes sentient. She dies as a suicide bomber and dude discovers the avatar and tries to bring his daughter back by building it a body. It becomes the first Cylon and humanity is extinguished from that particular solar system. The second Cylon turns out to be Admiral Adama's older sister who was also killed in the same suicide bombing.

In any case, it's worth remembering that in reality people are more than what they write, speak, and otherwise ever put into language to communicate to or record for others. I imagine this particular tactic would not work well for me since I have sent single digit SMS messages in the past year and presumably nowhere near six figures as a lifetime number. You'd have to find some other source of writing, but I don't know what that would be. I'd guess at least 90% of the comments I even compose for Hacker News end up being deleted without ever posting them. Turning what I make public into a copy of me would give you a heavily censored, curated image of a fake person who is far more coherent and kind than the real me, and he would also seem to know everything since he's very good at web search. Really, I am quite surprised even reading old forum posts of mine from 20 years ago that I manage to track down, in part because of how much my personality and opinions have changed since then, but also at the impressive way I was able to digest and spew so much basically correct as far as I can tell information into coherent arguments even though I don't think I understood very much of it and remember even less.

I'd expect most Hacker News posters to buy into the obvious truism that what you see on Instagram is not real people but that is equally true of text. Doing this kind of thing at-large risks creating simulacra of perfectly curated uber-humans that would make real people supremely inadequate. We're already going through a mental health crisis exacerbated by people feeling they can't live up to social media personas.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure an fp32 7b model uses just shy of 27gb of vram. The performance losses at int8 are minuscule, even down to int5 is still very usable. Why would you try and run it fp32 or fp16?

My naive intuition is that you'd want to train on the highest precision you have the horsepower for, and then after training, you might be able to get away with quantizing to a lower precision for inference. I would also expect that fp32 might be overkill, but that anything less than fp16 would start to show a noticeable loss in quality, especially in training. I can't imagine int8 being good at all. And I would thin…

https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/1684

You are broadly better off running a larger, more quantized model, than a smaller model at a higher precision. A 65b parameter model with 2bit quantization still outperforms an fp16 30b parameter model in perplexity and qualitative testing. No one I know does fp32, there's no benefit.

People train LoRAs at low precision regularly. The folks on /r/localllama are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done on consumer hardware, and the boundaries are further out than you'd think.

Also, if you want to really blow-up your intuition, check out model merges...

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"On the casino I used to run"? That might be the most casual intro to what sounds like a fascinating corner of the internet I never experienced. Do you have any other interesting stories or references to that time of your life?

I do, and I don't mind showing you them if you're interested, but why do you care? ah fuckit. SO yeah, I lived outside the US and ran a bitcoin casino for some years for non-US players, which was blocked to US IP ranges and required IDs to eliminate US customers (even though Bitcoin gambling still wasn't officially illegal at the time). My general idea was to make a casino for smart people who liked puzzles, so to th…

Doug?

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#119
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems really unethical to train a model on someone else's words without their permission.

When I read your comment I trained my own mental model on your words. How is that any different? When a human reads words they apply a sophisticated theory of mind to contextualize the writing and the mental state of the author. If anything, LLM fine tuning is far less invasive than having a person read your writing.

This is an unserious argument and no one is swayed by it.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems really unethical to train a model on someone else's words without their permission.

Isn't that basically what OpenAI did?

It's what the original dataset did, and then they further compounded on that.
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