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Birds are more complicated than jet engines, but jet engines travel a lot faster.
They also kill a lot more people when they fail.
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Reflect a moment over the fact that LLMs currently are just text generators. Also that the conversational behavior we see it’s just examples of conversations that we have the model to mimic so when we say “System: you are a helpful assistant. User: let’s talk. Assistant:” it will complete the text in a way that mimics a conversation?. Yeah, we improved over that using reinforcement learning to steer the text generati…
> Reflect a moment over the fact that LLMs currently are just text generators. You could say the same thing about humans.
The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is how they never seem to understand "the flow" of an actual conversation between humans. When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning. LLMs don't do this. Instead,…
You obviously never wasted countless hours trying to talk to other people on online dating apps.
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> Like it can't think or reason about something without writing it out first. LLM's neither think nor reason at all.
Right, so LLM companies should stop advertising their models can think and reason.
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Reflect a moment over the fact that LLMs currently are just text generators. Also that the conversational behavior we see it’s just examples of conversations that we have the model to mimic so when we say “System: you are a helpful assistant. User: let’s talk. Assistant:” it will complete the text in a way that mimics a conversation?. Yeah, we improved over that using reinforcement learning to steer the text generati…
> Reflect a moment over the fact that LLMs currently are just text generators. You could say the same thing about humans.
Humans existed for 10s to 100s of thousands of years without text. or even words for that matter.
We are trying to fix probability with more probability. That is a losing game. Thanks for pointing out the elephant in the room with LLMs. The basic design is non-deterministic. Trying to extract "facts" or "truth" or "accuracy" is an exercise in futility.
Is it? I thought an LLM was deterministic provided you run the exact same query on exact same hardware at a temperature of 0.
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Human minds are more complicated than a language model that behaves like a stochastic echo.
Birds are more complicated than jet engines, but jet engines travel a lot faster.
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Yes you're totally right! I misunderstood what you meant, let me write six more paragraphs based on a similar misunderstanding rather than just trying to get clarification from you
My favorite is when it bounces back and forth between the same two wrong answers, each time admitting that the most recent answer is wrong and going back to the previous wrong answer. Doesn't matter if you tell it "that's not correct and neither is ____ so don't try that instead," it likes those two answers and it's going to keep using them.
The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is how they never seem to understand "the flow" of an actual conversation between humans. When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning. LLMs don't do this. Instead,…
This drives me nuts when trying to bounce an architecture or coding solution idea off an LLM. A human would answer with something like "what if you split up the responsibility and had X service or Y whatever". No matter how many times you tell the LLM not to return code, it returns code. Like it can't think or reason about something without writing it out first.
Setting aside the philosophical questions around "think" and "reason"... it can't.
In my mind, as I write this, I think through various possibilities and ideas that never reach the keyboard, but yet stay within my awareness.
For an LLM, that awareness and thinking through can only be done via its context window. It has to produce text that maintains what it thought about in order for that past to be something that it has moving forward.
There are aspects to a prompt that can (in some interfaces) hide this internal thought process. For example, the ChatGPT has the "internal thinking" which can be shown - https://chatgpt.com/share/69278cef-8fc0-8011-8498-18ec077ede... - if you expand the first "thought for 32 seconds" bit it starts out with:
I'm thinking the physics of gravity assists should be stable enough for me to skip browsing since it's not time-sensitive. However, the instructions say I must browse when in doubt. I’m not sure if I’m in doubt here, but since I can still provide an answer without needing updates, I’ll skip it.
However, this is in the ChatGPT interface. If I'm using an interface that doesn't allow internal self-prompts / thoughts to be collapsed then such an interface would often be displaying code as part of its working through the problem.
You'll also note a bit of the system prompt leaking in there - "the instructions say I must browse when in doubt". For an interface where code is the expected product, then there could be system prompts that also get in there that try to always produce code.
The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is how they never seem to understand "the flow" of an actual conversation between humans. When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning. LLMs don't do this. Instead,…
Yes you're totally right! I misunderstood what you meant, let me write six more paragraphs based on a similar misunderstanding rather than just trying to get clarification from you
The only reliable way to recover is to edit your previous question to include the clarification, and let it regenerate the answer.