Live data from Hacker News

Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

w4g1.dev

61–70 of 197 posts

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#61
Reasoning is not separable from the particulars of a specific language game / linguistic practice. I’m sure some of the things the author predicts will happen, but the idea of some sort of abstractly perfect reasoner separated from the semantic content of language gets fundamentally wrong what reasoning is.

Edit: I ran this article through pangram and it is “100% AI generated”. Cool.

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#62
post #30

Ideally what I'd like to see is pluggable knowledge bases. So if I'm e.g. coding a SwiftUI app for navigation, I'd take 9B of basic coding and reasoning, add 10B of swift/swiftUI, add 5B of GIS/geography knowledge and another 5B of frontend app design knowledge. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python. Then when I want to research electronics components, I grab a 15B model of agentic research techniques…

> I want to click together a model that is laser-focused on what I am doing This is roughly what multi-agent systems are built for. This is possible with models too, but "making one on the fly" is much easier with agent coordination rather than model weights, since they all speak the same language. There is an IBM Mainframe vs Google Distributed system division here. Like Seymour Cray said - two oxen or 1024 chickens…

> This is roughly what multi-agent systems are built for.

I think I disagree. For some things, maybe that works - but think of a multi-agent system where one agent understands the code, and passes it off to the reasoning agent to figure out what the bug is. This system is going to suck. Because encoding enough info to figure out what the bug is would just be dumping every single line of the code.

So say agent 1 (reasoning) asks agent 2 (swift) to explain what is happening in File.swift. Anything agent 2 passes to agent 1 short of the entire code is a lossy transfer - and then the bug gets missed.

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#63
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the otherhand, your own brain probably doesn't use your eyes to hear.

You don't think reading lips helps you understand people?

That's still not hearing.

Hearing has volume, direction, pitch, it's spacial processing etc

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#65
You can look at the benchmark and the GPT-5 failures like answering "April 22, 2019" instead of the correct "Oct 23, 2018" for the question:

What day, month, and year was Carrie Underwood's album "Cry Pretty" certified Gold by the RIAA?

If your idea of the smartest person in the world is the guy who always wins tuesday night pub trivia, this blog post is for you. It also gets it's foundational factual claim wrong (as seen via epoch.ai). Very on brand.

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simple-qa-verified?view=graph&ta...

https://logs.epoch.ai/inspect-viewer/c79c08da/viewer.html?lo...

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#66

> the 24GB card that's been sitting in gaming PCs since 2022. I'd wager most people have less. In 2022 a 3080 might have 12 GB if you were lucky, 10 if you weren't -- and you paid for the privilege. A current RTX 5080 is only 16GB.

I'm still getting by mostly fine with a 4GB 1650 Super. (2020 vintage.)

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#67

Ideally what I'd like to see is pluggable knowledge bases. So if I'm e.g. coding a SwiftUI app for navigation, I'd take 9B of basic coding and reasoning, add 10B of swift/swiftUI, add 5B of GIS/geography knowledge and another 5B of frontend app design knowledge. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python. Then when I want to research electronics components, I grab a 15B model of agentic research techniques…

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work. You can’t really specialize a model. You specialize the harness. A well-trained general purpose LLM doesn’t need examples in its training data, it can write good code in a new language you invented yesterday with just a spec definition. And it will perform better than a small model trained on lots of examples of your invented language. The reason is because of…

This is so right. We training Whisper Large model on 20,000 audio samples specific to a domain and it ended up reducing the ASR by 5% while improving WER of the finetuned domain by 0.5%.

Instead we ended up with no finetuning. We give audio snippet to 2 AsR models, take 3 best transcriptions and ask the LLm to pick the best based on the context. That produced significantly higher accuracy in how an agent understands the users.

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#68

Ideally what I'd like to see is pluggable knowledge bases. So if I'm e.g. coding a SwiftUI app for navigation, I'd take 9B of basic coding and reasoning, add 10B of swift/swiftUI, add 5B of GIS/geography knowledge and another 5B of frontend app design knowledge. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python. Then when I want to research electronics components, I grab a 15B model of agentic research techniques…

The problem with this idea is that knowing Python makes the model a better Swift programmer, as does a higher-number of parameters during training. So you'd be so much better off with a 90B general purpose model trained on everything anyway.

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#69
> This mostly solves hallucination

The author is factually incorrect here. Moving information out of the model weights and into the input of the model's context window in no way ensures that the model will accurately output content that was input from the context. This is true even when RAG is used to input exactly the correct data.

Re: Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

#70

Ideally what I'd like to see is pluggable knowledge bases. So if I'm e.g. coding a SwiftUI app for navigation, I'd take 9B of basic coding and reasoning, add 10B of swift/swiftUI, add 5B of GIS/geography knowledge and another 5B of frontend app design knowledge. My model doesn't need to know a single line of python. Then when I want to research electronics components, I grab a 15B model of agentic research techniques…

An LLM works better the more disparate world knowledge it has, even if it's not immediately obvious why it would be relevant. The model finds a structure to the problem you give it in a largely language-agnostic way that benefits from training on every language (these things are direct descendants of Google Translate), and even non-programming knowledge - the structure of your task might resemble an ancient Chinese p…

Thanks for putting this so well. The mathematical evidence for this “general intelligence underlying everything” is the “universal geometry of embeddings” paper. Fascinating read. Or as the ancient philosophers used to say, the one who knows God knows everything.
Post reply on HN