LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

Goes to show that "bad at jokes" is not a fundamental issue of LLMs, and that there are still performance gains from increasing model scale, as expected. But not exactly the same performance gains you get from reasoning or RLVR.

That's a decent, low-level, Christmas cracker-quality joke.

In fact the training process is all about minimizing "perplexity", where perplexity is a measure of how surprised (perplexed) the model is by its training data. It's some exponential inverse of the loss function, I always forget the exact definition.

With enough parameters the models are able to mix and match things pretty well, so the examples of them generating funny jokes aren't necessarily a great rebuttal as there are so many jokes on the web and to find them requires nearly exact keyword matching. A better observation is that we haven't heard many stories of LLMs inventing things. I feel I read about AI a lot and yet the best example I can come up with was some Wordle-like game someone got GPT4 to invent and that was a couple of years ago.

I've found this to be consistently true in my own work. Any time I come up with an algorithm or product idea I think might be novel, I've asked a model to suggest solutions to the same problem. They never can do it. With some leading questions the smartest models will understand the proposal and agree it could work, but they never come up with such ideas cold. What they think of is always the most obvious, straight line, least common denominator kind of suggestions. It makes sense that this is because they're trained to be unsurprising.

Fixing this is probably the best definition of AGI we're going to get. Being surprising at the right time and unsurprising at others is one of the hardest things to do well even for people. We've all known the awkward guy who's learning how to be funny by just saying as much weird stuff as possible and seeing what gets a reaction. And in the corporate environment, my experience has been that innovative people are lauded and praised when they're inventing a golden goose, but shortly after are often demonized or kicked out. The problem being that they keep saying surprising things but people don't like being surprised, especially if it's an unpleasant surprise of the form "saying something true but unsayable", e.g. I don't want to work on product X because nobody is using it. What most people want is a machine that consistently generates pleasant surprises and is a personality-free cog otherwise, but that's hard for even very intelligent humans. It's often hard even to want to do that, because personality isn't something you can flick on and off like a lightswitch. A good example is how Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most successful executives of our era, would have been fired from his own company several times already if he didn't control the voting shares.