Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 452 posts

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#151

Post by 9dev »

crazygringo wrote: post #103
frahs wrote: post #97

Wait so what does the model think that it is? If it doesn't know computers exist yet, I mean, and you ask it how it works, what does it say?

That's my first question too. When I first started using LLM's, I was amazed at how thoroughly it understood what it itself was, the history of its development, how a context window works and why, etc. I was worried I'd trigger some kind of existential crisis in it, but it seemed to have a very accurate mental model of itself, and could even trace the steps that led it to deduce it really was e.g. the ChatGPT it had…

They don’t understand anything, they just have text in the training data to answer these questions from. Having existential crises is the privilege of actual sentient beings, which an LLM is not.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#152

Post by mlinksva »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #100

It would be interesting to see how hard it would be to walk these models towards general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” with special relativity was published in 1905. His work on general relativity was published 10 years later in 1915. The earliest knowledge cuttoff of these models is 1913, in between the relativity papers. The knowledge cutoffs are also r…

Different cutoff but similar question thrown out in https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-sutton#:~:text=If%20y... inspiring https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/llm-trained-on-data-...

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#153

Post by root_axis »

a1j9o94 wrote: post #140
root_axis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate further?

Not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a non trivial argument to make that our thoughts are just auto complete. What is the next most likely word based on what you're seeing. Ever watched a movie and guessed the plot? Or read a comment and know where it was going to go by the end? And I know not everyone thinks in a literal stream of words all the time (I do) but I would argue that those people's br…

There's no evidence for it, nor any explanation for why it should be the case from a biological perspective. Tokens are an artifact of computer science that have no reason to exist inside humans. Human minds don't need a discrete dictionary of reality in order to model it.

Prior to LLMs, there was never any suggestion that thoughts work like autocomplete, but now people are working backwards from that conclusion based on metaphorical parallels.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#154

Post by mleroy »

Ontologically, this historical model understands the categories of "Man" and "Woman" just as well as a modern model does. The difference lies entirely in the attributes attached to those categories. The sexism is a faithful map of that era's statistical distribution.

You could RAG-feed this model the facts of WWII, and it would technically "know" about Hitler. But it wouldn't share the modern sentiment or gravity. In its latent space, the vector for "Hitler" has no semantic proximity to "Evil".

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#155

Post by vintermann »

crazygringo wrote: post #103
frahs wrote: post #97

Wait so what does the model think that it is? If it doesn't know computers exist yet, I mean, and you ask it how it works, what does it say?

That's my first question too. When I first started using LLM's, I was amazed at how thoroughly it understood what it itself was, the history of its development, how a context window works and why, etc. I was worried I'd trigger some kind of existential crisis in it, but it seemed to have a very accurate mental model of itself, and could even trace the steps that led it to deduce it really was e.g. the ChatGPT it had…

I imagine it would get into spiritism and more exotic psychology theories and propose that it is an amalgamation of the spirit of progress or something.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#156

Post by krackers »

deadbolt wrote: post #78
libraryofbabel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the 2023 take on LLMs. It still gets repeated a lot. But it doesn’t really hold up anymore - it’s more complicated than that. Don’t let some factoid about how they are pretrained on autocomplete-like next token prediction fool you into thinking you understand what is going on in that trillion parameter neural network. Sure, LLMs do not think like humans and they may not have human-level creativity. Sometimes…

As someone who still might have a '2023 take on LLMs', even though I use them often at work, where would you recommend I look to learn more about what a '2025 LLM' is, and how they operate differently?

Papers on mechanistic interpratability and representation engineering, e.g. from Anthropic would be a good start.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#157

Post by thesumofall »

While obvious, it’s still interesting that its morals and values seem to derive from the texts it has ingested. Does that mean modern LLMs cannot challenge us beyond mere facts? Or does it just mean that this small model is not smart enough to escape the bias of its training data? Would it not be amazing if LLMs could challenge us on our core beliefs?

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#159

Post by vintermann »

nine_k wrote: post #65
jimmy76615 wrote: post #42

> We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. The idea of training such a model is really a great one, but not releasing it because someone might be offended by the output is just stupid beyond believe.

Public access, triggering a few racist responses from the model, a viral post on Xitter, the usual outrage, a scandal, the project gets publicly vilified, financing ceases. The researchers carry the tail of negative publicity throughout their remaining careers. Why risk all this?

Because the problem of bad faith attacks can only get worse if you fold every time.

Sooner or later society has to come emotionally to terms with the fact that other times and places value things completely different from us, hold as important things we don't care about and are indifferent to things we do care about.

Intellectually I'm sure we already know, but e.g. banning old books because they have reprehensible values (or even just use nasty words) - or indeed, refusing to release a model trained on historic texts "because it could be abused" is a sign that emotionally we haven't.

It's not that it's a small deal, or should be expected to be easy. It's basically what Popper called "the strain of civilization" and posited as explanation for the totalitarianism which was rising in his time. But our values can't be so brittle that we can't even talk or think about other value systems.

Post reply on HN