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Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

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Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#131
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a honeypot. He's telling people openai doesn't respect robots.txt and just scrapes whatever the hell it wants.

It seems to respect it as the majority of the requests are for the robots.txt.

I'm not sure any publisher means for their robots.txt to be read as:

"You're disallowed, but go head and slurp the content anyway so you can look for external links or any indication that maybe you are allowed to digest this material anyway, and then interpret that how you'd like. I trust you to know what's best and I'm sure you kind of get the gist of what I mean here."

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#132
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says 3 million, and 1.8 million are for robots.txt So 1.2 million non robots.txt requests, when his robots.txt file is configured as follows # buzz off User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / Theoretically if they were actually respecting robots.txt they wouldn't crawl any pages on the site. Which would also mean they wouldn't be following any links... aka not finding the N subdomains.

His site has a subdomain for every page, and the crawler is considering those each to be unique sites.

There are fewer than 10 links on each domain, how did GPTBot find out about the 1.8M unique sites? By crawling the sites it's not supposed to crawl, ignoring robots.txt. "disallow: /" doesn't mean "you may peek at the homepage to find outbound links that may have a different robots.txt"

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#133
post #69
post #30

This reminds me of how GPT-2/3/J came across https://reddit.com/r/counting , wherein redditors repeatedly post incremental numbers to count to infinity. It considered their usernames, like SolidGoldMagikarp, such common strings on the Internet that, during tokenization, it treated them as top-level tokens of their own. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solid... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAx…

During tokenization, the usernames became tokens... but before training the actual model, they removed stuff like that from the training data, so it was never trained on text which contains those tokens. As such, it ended up with tokens which weren't associated with anything; glitch tokens.

It's interesting: perhaps the stability (from a change management perspective) of the tokenization algorithm, being able to hold that constant, between old and new training runs was deemed more important than trying to clean up the data at an earlier phase of the pipeline. And the eventuality of glitch tokens was deemed an acceptable consequence.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#134
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful. In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence…

A lot of LLM hallucination is because of the internal conflict between alignment for helpfulness and lack of a clear answer. It's much like when someone gets out of their depth in a conversation and dissembles their way through to try and maintain their illusion of competence. In these cases, if you give the LLM explicit permission to tell you that it doesn't know in cases where it's not sure, that will significantly…

"In these cases, if you give the LLM explicit permission to tell you that it doesn't know in cases where it's not sure, that will significantly reduce hallucinations."

I've noticed that while this can help to prevent hallucinations, it can also cause it to go way too far in the other direction and start telling you it doesn't know for all kinds of questions it really can answer.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slow stream that never ends?

This would be considered a Slow Loris attack, and I'm actually curious how scrapers would handle it. I'm sure the big players like Google would deal with it gracefully.

You just set limits on everything (time, buffers, ...), which is easier said than done. You need to really understand your libraries and all the layers down to the OS, because its enough to have one abstraction that doesn't support setting limits and it's an invitation for (counter-)abuse.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#136
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good observation. If LLMs had taken off 15 years ago, maybe they would answer every question with “this has already been asked before. Please use the search function”

Marked as duplicate.

Your question may be a better fit for a different StackExchange site.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#137
post #86
post #30

This reminds me of how GPT-2/3/J came across https://reddit.com/r/counting , wherein redditors repeatedly post incremental numbers to count to infinity. It considered their usernames, like SolidGoldMagikarp, such common strings on the Internet that, during tokenization, it treated them as top-level tokens of their own. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solid... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAx…

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful. In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence…

Contrast with Q&A on products on Amazon where people routinely answer that way. I have flagged responses saying "I don't know" but nothing ever comes of it.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#138

I'm more interested in what that content farm is for. It looks pointless, but I suspect there's a bizarre economic incentive. There are affiliate links, but how much could that possibly bring in?

This is honeypot. The author, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Levine, keeps it just to notice any new (significant) scraping operation launched that will invariably hit his little farm and let be seen in the logs. He's well known anti-spam operative with his various efforts now dating back multiple decades.

Notice how he casually drops a link to the landing page in the NANOG message. That's how the bots will get a bait.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#139
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful. In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence…

That’s a good observation. If LLMs had taken off 15 years ago, maybe they would answer every question with “this has already been asked before. Please use the search function”

Nowadays they are instead learning to say "please join our Discord for support"!

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#140
post #71

Eventually, OpenAI (and friends) are going to be training their models on almost exclusively AI generated content, which is more often than not slightly incorrect when it comes to Q&A, and the quality of AI responses trained on that content will quickly deteriorate. Right now, most internet content is written by humans. But in 5 years? Not so much. I think this is one of the big problems that the AI space needs to so…

Is it (I am not a worker in this space, so genuine question)?

My thoughts - I teach myself all the time. Self reflection with a loss function can lead to better results. Why can't the LLMs do the same (I grasp that they may not be programmed that way currently)? Top engines already do it with chess, go, etc. They exceed human abilities without human gameplay. To me that seems like the obvious and perhaps only route to general intelligence.

We as humans can recognize botnets. Why wouldn't the LLM? Sort of in a hierarchal boost - learn the language, learn about bots and botnets (by reading things like this discussion), learn to identify them, learn that their content doesn't help the loss function much, etc. I mean sure, if the main input is "as a language model I cannot..." and that is treated as 'gospel' that would lead to a poor LLM, but i don't think that is the future. LLMs are interacting with humans - how many times do they have to re-ask a question - that should be part of the learning/loss function. How often do they copy the text into their clipboard (weak evidence that the reply was good)? do you see that text in the wild, showing it was used? If so, in what context "Witness this horrible output of chatGPT: " should result in lower scores and suppression of that kind of thing.

I dream of the day where I have a local LLM (ie individualized, I don't care where the hardware is) as a filter on my internet. Never see a botnet again, or a stack overflow q/a that is just "this has already been answered" (just show me where it was answered), rewrite things to fix grammar, etc. We already have that with automatic translation of languages in your browser, but now we have the tools for something more intelligent than that. That sort of thing. Of course there will be an arms race, but in one sense who cares. If a bot is entirely indistinguishable from a person, is that a difference that matters? I can think of scenerios where the answer is an emphatic YES, but overall it seems like a net improvement.

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