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Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

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Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#131

Post by duskwuff »

appleorchard46 wrote: post #126
amarshall wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends if one is using “AI” as a tool or as a replacement for an intelligent expert? The former, sure, it’s maybe not expected, because the prompter is already an intelligent expert. If the latter, then yes, I think, because if you gave the task to an expect and they did not notice this, I would consider them not good at their job. See also Anscombe's quartet[1] and the Datasaurus dozen[2] (mentioned in a…

This is true, but I would replace 'intelligent expert' with 'intelligent human expert'. Graphing data to analyze it - and then seeing shapes and creatures in said graph - is a distinctly human practice, and not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis (the obvious exception being when said data draws a picture). I think it's because the interface uses human language that people expect AI to make the same as…

> Graphing data to analyze it - and then seeing shapes and creatures in said graph - is a distinctly human practice, and not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis...

I disagree. Even apart from the obviously silly dinosaur and star in the Datasaurus Dozen, the othe plots depict data sets which are clustered in specific ways which point clearly to something unusual going on in the data. For instance, no competent analysis of the "dots" data set would fail to call out that the points were all clustered tightly around nine evenly spaced centers. Whether you come to that conclusion through numerical analysis or by looking at a graph is immaterial, but, at least for us meatbags, drawing a graph is highly effective.

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#132

Post by brookst »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #122
appleorchard46 wrote: post #91

These posts about X task LLMs fails at when you give it Y prompt are getting more and more silly. If you ask an AI to analyze some data, should the default behavior be to use that data to make various types of graphs, export said graphs, feed them back in to itself, then analyze the shapes of those graphs to see if they resemble an animal? Personally I would be very annoyed if I actually wanted a statistical analysis…

You don't think "Examine the data" and "Which other conclusions can you draw from the data?" are open-ended? And even when explicitly prompted to look at the plot, they only brush up against the data anomalies rather than properly analyzing the plot.

What’s the point though? That LLMs tend to be constraint by constraints in their prompting? That seems unsurprising.

Humans are visual animals. We can spot a chicken in a graph, but we’re unlikely to be able to tell that a different graph is using XY coordinates to encode a message against a one-time pad. But so what?

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#133

Post by appleorchard46 »

duskwuff wrote: post #131
appleorchard46 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but I would replace 'intelligent expert' with 'intelligent human expert'. Graphing data to analyze it - and then seeing shapes and creatures in said graph - is a distinctly human practice, and not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis (the obvious exception being when said data draws a picture). I think it's because the interface uses human language that people expect AI to make the same as…

> Graphing data to analyze it - and then seeing shapes and creatures in said graph - is a distinctly human practice, and not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis... I disagree. Even apart from the obviously silly dinosaur and star in the Datasaurus Dozen, the othe plots depict data sets which are clustered in specific ways which point clearly to something unusual going on in the data. For instance, no c…

> Whether you come to that conclusion through numerical analysis or by looking at a graph is immaterial, but, at least for us meatbags, drawing a graph is highly effective.

This is what I was trying to say - some things that are extremely helpful for humans (i.e. making graphs) might not be as necessary for AI, so asking a question and expecting a response contingent upon the particular way humans approach a problem is unlikely to get the results desired.

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#135

Post by runjake »

coder543 wrote: post #56
runjake wrote: post #28

Only tangentially related to this story, I've been trying for months to train the YOLO models to recognize my Prussian blue cat, with its assorted white spots, as a cat rather than a dog or a person. However, it refuses to cooperate. It's maddening. As a result, I receive "There is a person at your front door" notifications at all hours of the night.

How exactly are you trying to train and deploy this YOLO model? What kind of accuracy are you seeing against the validation set at the end of the training process?

“Hey, here’s 250 photos of my cat. This is a cat. It is not a dog. It is not a person.”

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#136

Post by HappMacDonald »

phyzome wrote: post #108
forgotusername6 wrote: post #49

I had a recent similar experience with chat gpt and a gorilla. I was designing a rather complicated algorithm so I wrote out all the steps in words. I then asked chatgpt to verify that it made sense. It said it was well thought out, logical etc. My colleague didn't believe that it was really reading it properly so I inserted a step in the middle "and then a gorilla appears" and asked it again. Sure enough, it again c…

« saying that it thought » This is, quite literally, not something that ChatGPT has the capability to do -- reporting on its thought process, that is. This is a hallucination.

Most human self-reflection and to an extent even memory is similarly post-facto, however.

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#137

Post by asddubs »

jancsika wrote: post #84
forgotusername6 wrote: post #49

I had a recent similar experience with chat gpt and a gorilla. I was designing a rather complicated algorithm so I wrote out all the steps in words. I then asked chatgpt to verify that it made sense. It said it was well thought out, logical etc. My colleague didn't believe that it was really reading it properly so I inserted a step in the middle "and then a gorilla appears" and asked it again. Sure enough, it again c…

Just imagining an episode of Star Trek where the inhabitants of a planet have been failing to progress in warp drive tech for several generations. The team beams down to discover that society's tech stopped progressing when they became addicted to pentesting their LLM for intelligence, only to then immediately patch the LLM in order to pass each particular pentest that it failed. Now the society's time and energy has…

that's pretty good!

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#138

Post by DonHopkins »

jancsika wrote: post #84
forgotusername6 wrote: post #49

I had a recent similar experience with chat gpt and a gorilla. I was designing a rather complicated algorithm so I wrote out all the steps in words. I then asked chatgpt to verify that it made sense. It said it was well thought out, logical etc. My colleague didn't believe that it was really reading it properly so I inserted a step in the middle "and then a gorilla appears" and asked it again. Sure enough, it again c…

Just imagining an episode of Star Trek where the inhabitants of a planet have been failing to progress in warp drive tech for several generations. The team beams down to discover that society's tech stopped progressing when they became addicted to pentesting their LLM for intelligence, only to then immediately patch the LLM in order to pass each particular pentest that it failed. Now the society's time and energy has…

You really nailed the Zen of Star Trek Plots, where the fate of a civilization always boils down to a dramatic wrestling match.

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#139

Post by DonHopkins »

homefree wrote: post #99
sillysaurusx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There actually is an episode of TNG similar to that. The society stopped being able to think for themselves, because the AI did all their thinking for them. Anything the AI didn’t know how to do, they didn’t know how to do. It was in season 1 or season 2.

The Machine Stops also touches on a lot of these ideas and was written in 1909! -- "The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Commun…

Thanks for posting that story, I hadn't heard of it before!

Another take on the AI Halting Problem.

Stanislaw Lem's Golem XIV describes a series of super-intelligent computers that just suddenly decide to stop communicating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

https://cannonballread.com/2021/05/golem-xiv-blauracke/

https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx/34

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741124

tialaramex on Jan 12, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Superintelligence cannot be contained: Lessons fro...

Check out the Stanisław Lem story "GOLEM XIV".

GOLEM is one of a series of machines constructed to plan World War III, as is its sister HONEST ANNIE. But to the frustration of their human creators these more sophisticated machines refuse to plan World War III and instead seem to become philosophers (Golem) or just refuse to communicate with humans at all (Annie).

Lots of supposedly smart humans try to debate with Golem and eventually they (humans supervising the interaction) have to impose a "rule" to stop people opening their mouths the very first time they see Golem and getting humiliated almost before they've understood what is happening, because it's frustrating for everybody else.

Golem is asked if humans could acquire such intelligence and it explains that this is categorically impossible, Golem is doing something that is not just a better way to do the same thing as humans, it's doing something altogether different and superior that humans can't do. It also seems to hint that Annie is, in turn, superior in capability to Golem and that for them such transcendence to further feats is not necessarily impossible.

This is one of the stories that Lem wrote by an oblique method, what we have is extracts from an introduction to an imaginary dry scientific record that details the period between GOLEM being constructed and... the eventual conclusion of the incident.

Anyway, I was reminded because while Lem has to be careful (he's not superintelligent after all) he's clearly hinting that humans aren't smart enough to recognise the superintelligence of GOLEM and ANNIE. One proposed reason for why ANNIE rather than GOLEM is responsible for the events described near the end of the story is that she doesn't even think about humans, for the same reason humans largely don't think about flies. What's to think about? They're just an annoyance, to be swatted aside.

Re: Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?

#140

Post by DonHopkins »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #87
jancsika wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagining an episode of Star Trek where the inhabitants of a planet have been failing to progress in warp drive tech for several generations. The team beams down to discover that society's tech stopped progressing when they became addicted to pentesting their LLM for intelligence, only to then immediately patch the LLM in order to pass each particular pentest that it failed. Now the society's time and energy has…

That's actually a moderately decent pitch for an episode.

And it reeks of not being generated by an LLM!
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