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Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

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Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#121
post #88

Something I do sometimes is: - Have an AI chat model come up with an answer to a problem. - Have it write a report discussing the details of the problem and why it's answer is correct, directed at a person or AI model who has no knowledge of the initial problem or technical field. - Have a second AI model with no knowledge of the problem grade the report, and write it's own report either (a) asking for clarification…

We're there any situation that first conclusion from AI was completely changed? Can you give generally examples of situations where it changed or significantly improved overall result? It sounds cool.

I would be interested to know how ofter "oscillations" occur, where they flip flop from being too "agreeable" to challenges (which probably is just a sparse latent space). This happens to me pretty frequently, where you can repeatedly say "no that's wrong" and the LLM will do a 180, explaining why it was "in fact" wrong and you are "right", repeat.

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#123
post #35

I've done something similar for learning about a controversial topic. I ask it to act as if it is called Bob is a well informed supporter of one side (like Ukraine) and then act as if it is something named Alice who is a well informed supporter of another side (Russia) and they have to debate each other over a few prompts with a moderator named 'Sue' Then after a few rounds of the debate where Sue asks a bunch of que…

That seems like a terrible idea. At best it seems likely to help you make a false but convincing sounding case. I really hope no one is using that to help them understand controversial topics much less using that to determine their stances.

Id recommend looking into actual human experts who are trustworthy and reading them. Trying to get LLM to argue the case will just get you a lot of false information presented in a more convincing fashion

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#124
post #7

This is really cool! One strategy I often use (which is much simpler and more limited than this), is to finish my message with: “Please do a round of thinking in tags, then a round of self-critique in tags, and then a final round of , before responding.” It works very well. Similarly just asking it to “find the 5 biggest issues with its proposal” works pretty good (the 5 forcing it to find something , even if it’s mo…

Oh I really like that. It makes me want to have it score its ideas with metrics and then keep iterating until it meets some score.

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#125
How far is this going to go? Are we going to have a team of AI agents that runs a scrum team and meets for stand ups every couple of hours?

Are we going to replicate government bureaucracy with agents all debating topics all day long to find the best opinion?

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#126
post #88

Something I do sometimes is: - Have an AI chat model come up with an answer to a problem. - Have it write a report discussing the details of the problem and why it's answer is correct, directed at a person or AI model who has no knowledge of the initial problem or technical field. - Have a second AI model with no knowledge of the problem grade the report, and write it's own report either (a) asking for clarification…

For anything semi-adversarial, I have had good results asking the AI to come up with a plan, then take the side of the opponent coming with counter play/way to defeat the plan, finally asking for a revision of the initial plan given the potential reaction from the opponent.

The final plan you obtain is generally a lot more well rounded and thought out.

I find that amusing because the technique also works when I apply it to me. Picking flaws in your plan before revisiting it actually works.

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#127

This seems to be different than I expected from the title. I thought it would be explicitly adversarial. 1. You are the assistant. Please answer the question directly. 2. You are the cross-examiner. The assistant is wrong. Explain why. 3. You are the assistant. The cross-examiner is wrong. Defend your claim. 4. You are a judge. Did either party make their case, or is another round of argumentation required? I haven't…

Chatgpt shares context between chats. I wonder how that impacts it? It seems like a good approach though. What you dont want to do is ever suggest that its wrong yourself. Usually it will just assume it is wrong. Actually what I find impressive is when I do this and it actually pushes back to defend itself.

Does it share context even if no "memory updated" message appears indicating it has stored a fact about you?

I asked ChatGPT and it says no, but then again it's not reliable at introspection or at revealing data about how it works.

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In doing some DevOps-y type tasks recently (ansible, packer, docker, baking images with guestfish), I've found it very frustrating how much ChatGPT will confidently tell me to use flags on tools that don't exist, or hallicinate completely non-existent functions or behaviours. And then when I spend time trying what it suggests only to hit a wall and come back like wtf mate it breezily goes "oh yes so you're right, goo…

I did a stint in Devops and I found every models to be like this for all of the infra-as-code languages. Anything yaml based was especially bad. Even Amazon’s own offering completely made things up about Amazon’s own formats. I’d be curious as to why that is. It seems like there would be enough training data, and for Amazon in particular it seems like they could make a validation tool the model could use.

Maybe I'm excessively anthropomorphizing, but it does feel a bit analogous to my own thought process, like "I need feature XYZ, and based on other tools I'm more familiar with it should be an --xyz flag, so let me google for that and see if I'm right or if I instead find a four-year-old wontfix on Github where someone asked for what I need and got denied."

Except... the model is missing that final step; instead it just belches out its hypothesis, all dressed up in chirpy, confident-sounding language, certain that I'm moments away from having everything working just perfectly.

Re: Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In doing some DevOps-y type tasks recently (ansible, packer, docker, baking images with guestfish), I've found it very frustrating how much ChatGPT will confidently tell me to use flags on tools that don't exist, or hallicinate completely non-existent functions or behaviours. And then when I spend time trying what it suggests only to hit a wall and come back like wtf mate it breezily goes "oh yes so you're right, goo…

You can't get more info from LLMs than it actually holds. Like Anthropic pointed if LLMs knows the name but has no other info it starts hallucinating. The same probably happens here. LLM knows there must be a flag but can't remember all of them. Likely short reminder in prompt will help. (or search web for GPT) Just my $0.02.

It certainly feels like you can just by challenging it; then it happily finds other paths to what you want. So maybe internally it needs a second voice encouraging it to think harder about alternatives upfront.
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