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Where the goblins came from

openai.com

21–30 of 699 posts

Re: Where the goblins came from

#21

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

Seams, spirals, codexes, recursion, glyphs, resonance, the list goes on and on.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#22

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

>with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding

I thought this was an established term when it comes to working with codebases comprised of multiple interacting parts.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1325...

Re: Where the goblins came from

#23

> the evidence suggests that the broader behavior emerged through transfer from Nerdy personality training. > The rewards were applied only in the Nerdy condition, but reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them > Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in super…

Anthro means human and these are not human. Please do not use anthropology or any derivative of the word to refer to non-human constructs.

I suggest Synthetipologists, those who study beings of synthetic origin or type, aka synthetipodes, just as anthropologists study Anthropodes

Re: Where the goblins came from

#24
post #9

A plausible theory I've seen going around: https://x.com/QiaochuYuan/status/2049307867359162460

It is a stateless text / pixel auto-complete it has no references of self, stop spreading this bs.

is a kv cache not a kind of state? what does statefulness have to do with selfhood? how does a system prompt work at all if these things have no reference to themselves?

Re: Where the goblins came from

#26

> the evidence suggests that the broader behavior emerged through transfer from Nerdy personality training. > The rewards were applied only in the Nerdy condition, but reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them > Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in super…

Anthro means human and these are not human. Please do not use anthropology or any derivative of the word to refer to non-human constructs. I suggest Synthetipologists, those who study beings of synthetic origin or type, aka synthetipodes, just as anthropologists study Anthropodes

> Please do not use anthropology or any derivative of the word to refer to non-human constructs

So you, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords?

A rather risky position to adopt in public, innit ;-)

Re: Where the goblins came from

#28

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

One I saw recently was "wires" and "wired" from opus.

It was using it like every 3rd sentence and I was like, yeah I have seen people say wired like this but not really for how it was using it in every sentence.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#29
post #4

> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable. On another note, buzzword…

They give everyone the false and very misleading impression that with One prompt all kinds of complexity minimizes. Its a bed time story for children.

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety asserts that for a system to effectively regulate or control a complex environment, it must possess at least as much internal behavioral variety (complexity) as the environment it seeks to control.

This is what we see in nature. Massive variety. Thats a fundamental requirement of surviving all the unpredictablity in the universe.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#30

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

All GPTisms are like that. In moderation there's nothing wrong with any of them. But you start noticing them because a lot of people use these things, and c/p the responses verbatim (or now use claws, I guess). So they stand out.

I don't think it's training data overrepresentation, at least not alone. RLHF and more broadly "alignment" is probably more impactful here. Likely combined with the fact that most people prompt them very briefly, so the models "default" to whatever it was most straight-forward to get a good score.

I've heard plenty of "the system still had some gremlins, but we decided to launch anyway", but not from tens of thousands of people at the same time. That's "the catch", IMO.

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