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Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

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Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#21

You can also make huge spelling mistakes and use incomplete words with llms they just sem to know better than any spl chk wht you mean. I use such speak to cut my time spent typing to them.

Wouldn't this increase your token usage because the tokenizer now can't process whole words, but it needs to go letter by letter?

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#22
post #5

Oh boy. Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking . I.e. whatever feat of computation needs to happen to produce results you seek, it needs to fit in the tokens the LLM produces. Being a finite system, there's only so much computation the LLM internal structure can do per token, so the more you force the model to be concise, the more difficult the task becomes for it - worst case, you ca…

  > Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking.
Where do you get this memo ? Seems completely wrong to me. More computation does not translate to more "thinking" if you compute the wrong things (ie things that contribute significantly to the final sentence meaning).

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#23
post #5

Oh boy. Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking . I.e. whatever feat of computation needs to happen to produce results you seek, it needs to fit in the tokens the LLM produces. Being a finite system, there's only so much computation the LLM internal structure can do per token, so the more you force the model to be concise, the more difficult the task becomes for it - worst case, you ca…

I agree with this take in general, but I think we need to be prepared for nuance when thinking about these things.

Tokens are how an LLM works things out, but I think it's just as likely as not that LLMs (like people) are capable of overthinking things to the point of coming to a wrong answer when their "gut" response would have been better. I do not content that this is the default mode, but that it is both possible, and that it's more or less likely on one kind of problem than another, problem categories to be determined.

A specific example of this was the era of chat interfaces that leaned too far in the direction of web search when responding to user queries. No, claude, I don't want a recipe blogspam link or summary - just listen to your heart and tell me how to mix pancakes.

More abstractly: LLMs give the running context window a lot of credit, and will work hard to post-hoc rationalize whatever is in there, including any prior low-likelihood tokens. I expect many problematic 'hallucinations' are the result of an unlucky run of two or more low probability tokens running together, and the likelihood of that happening in a given response scales ~linearly with the length of response.

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#24
post #10

Idk I try talk like cavemen to claude. Claude seems answer less good. We have more misunderstandings. Feel like sometimes need more words in total to explain previous instructions. Also less context is more damage if typo. Who agrees? Could be just feeling I have. I often ad fluff. Feels like better result from LLM. Me think LLM also get less thinking and less info from own previous replies if talk like caveman.

[deleted]

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#28
post #5

Oh boy. Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking . I.e. whatever feat of computation needs to happen to produce results you seek, it needs to fit in the tokens the LLM produces. Being a finite system, there's only so much computation the LLM internal structure can do per token, so the more you force the model to be concise, the more difficult the task becomes for it - worst case, you ca…

That was my first thought too -- instead of talk like a caveman you could turn off reasoning, with probably better results.

Additionally, LLMs do not actually operate in text; much of the thinking happens in a much higher dimensional space that just happens to be decoded as text.

So unless the LLM was trained otherwise, making it talk like a caveman is more than just theoretically turning it into a caveman.

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#29
post #5

Oh boy. Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking . I.e. whatever feat of computation needs to happen to produce results you seek, it needs to fit in the tokens the LLM produces. Being a finite system, there's only so much computation the LLM internal structure can do per token, so the more you force the model to be concise, the more difficult the task becomes for it - worst case, you ca…

How do we know if a token sits at an abstract level or just the textual level ?

Re: Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick

#30
post #5

Oh boy. Someone didn't get the memo that for LLMs, tokens are units of thinking . I.e. whatever feat of computation needs to happen to produce results you seek, it needs to fit in the tokens the LLM produces. Being a finite system, there's only so much computation the LLM internal structure can do per token, so the more you force the model to be concise, the more difficult the task becomes for it - worst case, you ca…

When it comes to LLM you really cannot draw conclusions from first principles like this. Yes, it sounds reasonable. And things in reality aren't always reasonable.

Benchmark or nothing.

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