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Claude mixes up who said what

dwyer.co.za

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Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#51
Codex also has a similar issue, after finishing a task, declaring it finished and starting to work on something new... the first 1-2 prompts of the new task sometimes contains replies that are a summary of the completed task from before, with the just entered prompt seemingly ignored. A reminder if their idiot savant nature.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#52
I don't think the bug is anything special, just another confusion the model can make from it's own context. Even if the harness correctly identifies user messages, the model still has the power to make this mistake.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#53

> after using it for months you get a ‘feel’ for what kind of mistakes it makes Sure, go ahead and bet your entire operation on your intuition of how a non-deterministic, constantly changing black box of software "behaves". Don't see how that could backfire.

> bet your entire operation What straw man is doing that?

looking at the reddit forum, enough people to make interesting forum posts.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#54
post #5

Everything to do with LLM prompts reminds me of people doing regexes to try and sanitise input against SQL injections a few decades ago, just papering over the flaw but without any guarantees. It's weird seeing people just adding a few more "REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY DON'T DO THAT" to the prompt and hoping, to me it's just an unacceptable risk, and any system using these needs to treat the entire LLM as untrusted t…

Before 2023 I thought the way Star Trek portrayed humans fiddling with tech and not understanding any side effects was fiction. After 2023 I realized that's exactly how it's going to turn out. I just wish those self proclaimed AI engineers would go the extra mile and reimplement older models like RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, DNCs and then go on to Transformers (or the Attention is all you need paper). This way they would under…

curiosity (will probably) kill humanity

although whether humanity dies before the cat is an open question

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#55
I've seen this before, but that was with the small hodgepodge mytho-merge-mix-super-mix models that weren't very good. I've not seen this in any recent models, but I've already not used Claude much.

I think it makes sense that the LLM treats it as user input once it exists, because it is just next token completion. But what shouldn't happen is that the model shouldn't try to output user input in the first place.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#56
post #8

Why are tokens not coloured? Would there just be too many params if we double the token count so the model could always tell input tokens from output tokens?

I’ve been curious about this too - obvious performance overhead to have a internal/external channel but might make training away this class of problems easier

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#57

> after using it for months you get a ‘feel’ for what kind of mistakes it makes Sure, go ahead and bet your entire operation on your intuition of how a non-deterministic, constantly changing black box of software "behaves". Don't see how that could backfire.

So like every software? Why do you think there are so many security scanners and whatnot out there?

There are millions of lines of code running on a typical box. Unless you're in embedded, you have no real idea what you're running.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#58
post #5

Everything to do with LLM prompts reminds me of people doing regexes to try and sanitise input against SQL injections a few decades ago, just papering over the flaw but without any guarantees. It's weird seeing people just adding a few more "REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY DON'T DO THAT" to the prompt and hoping, to me it's just an unacceptable risk, and any system using these needs to treat the entire LLM as untrusted t…

I like the Dark Souls model for user input - messages. https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Messages Premeditated words and sentence structure. With that there is no need for moderation or anti-abuse mechanics. Not saying this is 100% applicable here. But for their use case it's a good solution.

> I like the Dark Souls model for user input - messages.

> Premeditated words and sentence structure. With that there is no need for moderation or anti-abuse mechanics.

I guess not, if you're willing to stick your fingers in your ears, really hard.

If you'd prefer to stay at least somewhat in touch with reality, you need to be aware that "predetermined words and sentence structure" don't even address the problem.

https://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-...

> Disney makes no bones about how tightly they want to control and protect their brand, and rightly so. Disney means "Safe For Kids". There could be no swearing, no sex, no innuendo, and nothing that would allow one child (or adult pretending to be a child) to upset another.

> Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?"

> The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear:

> No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed."

> "OK. That means Chat Is Out of HercWorld, there is absolutely no way to meet your standard without exorbitantly high moderation costs," we replied.

> One of their guys piped up: "Couldn’t we do some kind of sentence constructor, with a limited vocabulary of safe words?"

> Before we could give it any serious thought, their own project manager interrupted, "That won’t work. We tried it for KA-Worlds."

> "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

> "We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

> I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#59
post #46

There is no separation of "who" and "what" in a context of tokens. Me and you are just short words that can get lost in the thread. In other words, in a given body of text, a piece that says "you" where another piece says "me" isn't different enough to trigger anything. Those words don't have the special weight they have with people, or any meaning at all, really.

Aren’t there some markers in the context that delimit sections? In such case the harness should prevent the model from creating a user block.

This is the "prompts all the way down" problem which is endemic to all LLM interactions. We can harness to the moon, but at that moment of handover to the model, all context besides the tokens themselves is lost.

The magic is in deciding when and what to pass to the model. A lot of the time it works, but when it doesn't, this is why.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#60
post #8

Why are tokens not coloured? Would there just be too many params if we double the token count so the model could always tell input tokens from output tokens?

Instead of using just positional encodings, we absolutely should have speaker encodings added on top of tokens.
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