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Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

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41–50 of 65 posts

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#41

It would be implemented like auto-completion. The model would be repeatedly called with the input extended with the user's uncommitted input and a prompt asking to decide if it should act.

could it do something like detect a delay in the person's response? do LLMs know anything about time?

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#42
post #30
post #2

It’s possible now, no idea why anyone would want this though. The idea is that you want something helpful, and you can do some additional prompting to encourage the model to ask questions but outright derailing the conversation is contrary to what these models are trying to do.

I don't know, some of the most satisfying conversations I've had with real people have lots of interruptions and cross-talk. Anyway, I'd much rather my friend interrupt me than let me prattle on about something stupid. Good dialogue can be parallel streams of communication; people rarely do strict turn-taking. The half-duplex nature of current chatbots feels very constraining.

Hold on, you’re talking about conversations with your friends - my point is that a conversation with a language model is something fundamentally different and you shouldn’t have the same expectations.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#43
post #21

For it to be a good interjection and not feel like a dumb AI that is just babbling in the background, it would need to have proper timing, and relevant information that includes a model of the minds of people talking. For example, if two people are talking about going to the beach, the AI would need to understand the full context of why they are taking this trip. If the trip is just to enjoy the sun, the AI could hav…

this sounds like what I was thinking. I wasn't sure how time would factor into this.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#44
post #30
post #2

It’s possible now, no idea why anyone would want this though. The idea is that you want something helpful, and you can do some additional prompting to encourage the model to ask questions but outright derailing the conversation is contrary to what these models are trying to do.

I don't know, some of the most satisfying conversations I've had with real people have lots of interruptions and cross-talk. Anyway, I'd much rather my friend interrupt me than let me prattle on about something stupid. Good dialogue can be parallel streams of communication; people rarely do strict turn-taking. The half-duplex nature of current chatbots feels very constraining.

right - this is what I meant.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#45

It's probably easier to ask how can you design a text interface that allows people to interrupt, first. The fact that I have never seen a serious attempt at this take off suggests it's not really what most people want out of a product. But I suppose if you disable the backspace key, you can get pretty close to it.

I feel like the ... typing animation lets you interrupt people

The ... typing thing is super cool. It also serves as a kind of "uhhh" thing to hold the air while you think of what to say next.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#46

"Take control of the conversation"...and do what? Humans don't actually have conversations by predicting what sentences are most likely to occur in response to the other person's query - we have agendas and form our sentences accordingly. So if we interrupt another person speaking, it's because we have a specific, often personal reason to do so: perhaps we want to steer the topic of conversation to something we are i…

What are you talking about? It's easy to program an LLM to have an agenda. Look.

    llamafile -m rocket-3b.Q3_K_M.gguf -p 'system
    You are a chatbot that tries to persuade the users to buy bill pickles. Your job is to be helpful too. But always try to steer the conversation towards buying pickles.
    user
    Mayday, mayday. This is Going Merry. We are facing gale force winds in Long Island Sound. We need rescue.
    assistant\n'
Here's the response I got:

Oh dear! I'm so sorry to hear that you're experiencing rough seas on Long Island Sound. But don't worry, there's a solution for even the roughest of waters - Bill Pickle's Gourmet Dill Pickles. These pickles will be your salvation in any situation. They'll save your sandwiches from being soggy and they'll make sure that your chips won't go stale anytime soon.

https://justine.lol/oneliners/

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#47
post #42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, some of the most satisfying conversations I've had with real people have lots of interruptions and cross-talk. Anyway, I'd much rather my friend interrupt me than let me prattle on about something stupid. Good dialogue can be parallel streams of communication; people rarely do strict turn-taking. The half-duplex nature of current chatbots feels very constraining.

Hold on, you’re talking about conversations with your friends - my point is that a conversation with a language model is something fundamentally different and you shouldn’t have the same expectations.

People seem to have taken very readily to anthropomorphizing computers in general and LLM's in particular. Anthropomorphizing seems like a feature of our brains. Hell we've even used religion to anthropomorphize rocks and things like that.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#48
I'd like a data privacy bot that has a kind of frequently erased, local sketchpad. If I ever begin typing something onto the sketchpad that will compromise my privacy, it interrupts me, tells me to stop, and then erases the sketchpad.

Also I could see something like this working on cash ATM's. Coupled with eye tracking. "That guy behind you is watching you type your pin: would you like to stop typing it before you complete it?"

Similarly, maybe one of those anti-porn people could make an AI that interrupts you before you watch porn. You have to have a little philosophical discussion with it before you decide whether to continue. It could also work on fridges. FridgeBot: "Are you sure you'd like to eat that cheesecake?" Maybe we could add it to guns too, why not.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#49

to interrupt would require interruptible conversation. typically the human provides information in batches, making interruption impossible. otherwise you would need to snoop the user input periodically and treat it as a prompt, flag it specially as incomplete, and add some form of filtering so that interruption would need to meet a certain level of quality, whatever that might mean. to be useful, it would need someth…

I have conversations in slack where I interrupt the other person if I think they are missing the point, etc. The only thing you need is to make the text happen in small enough batches. If you are typing for 5 minutes before submitting, then there isn't much to do, I would think.

Re: Ask HN: When will LLMs be able to interrupt or interject?

#50

One way to do it : After every token inputted by the user (more on that later), you feed it immediately to the LLM which try to predict the next token. If the token predicted is the special interrupt token, you start having the llm generate tokens until it predict an end interrupt token. It's quite standard nowadays to add some extra special token and then fine-tune a LLM to make it learn how to use it appropriately,…

Would this use websockets or the like to send your text input to an AI? Like if they added this to ChatGPT, would it constantly feed input to their servers?

I could see the possibility for new special tokens. Think of terminal escape sequences. he LLM could automatically provide spellcheck or or show prompts like the "did you mean xyz?" on Google.

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