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GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

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Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#141

Post by arduanika »

sdenton4 wrote: post #134
arduanika wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the damn things are marketed under the word "intelligence". That word used to mean something.

It's an umwelt problem. Bats think we're idiots because we don't hear ultrasonic sound, and thus can't echolocate. And we call the LLMs idiots because they consume tokenized inputs, and don't have access to the raw character stream.

If you open your mind up too far, your brain will fall out.

LLMs are not intelligence. There's not some groovy sense in which we and they are both intelligent, just thinking on a different wavelength. Machines do not think.

We are inundated with this anthropomorphic chatter about them, and need to constantly deprogram ourselves.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#142

Post by eCa »

smsm42 wrote: post #83

What is fascinating here is the power of ironclad conviction. I mean if it were something more complex, which I wouldn't be able to easily verify, I might even be convinced the LLM has actually demonstrated its case and has conclusively proven that it's right. These models are, by definition, psychopaths (they can't feel emotions or empathize, obviously) and they are now exhibiting exactly the same behaviors human ps…

> which I wouldn't be able to easily verify, I might even be convinced the LLM has actually demonstrated its case and has conclusively proven that it's right

I think this example is one of many that has demonstrated why no output from an LLM can be trusted without outside verification.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#143

Post by vidarh »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #97
antonvs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really disingenuous for the industry to call warming tokens for output, "reasoning," as if some autocomplete before more autocomplete is all we needed to solve the issue of consciousness. There's no obvious connection between reasoning and consciousness. It seems perfectly possible to have a model that can reason without being conscious. Also, dismissing what these models do as "autocomplete" is extremely disi…

It would require you to change the definition of reasoning, or it would require you to believe computers can think. A locally trained text-based foundation model is indistinguishable from autocompletion, and outputs very erratic text, and the further you train it's ability to diminish irrelevant tokens, or guide it to produce specifically formatted output, you've just moved its ability to curve fit specific requireme…

> or it would require you to believe computers can think.

Unless you can show us that humans can calculate functions outside the Turing computable, it is logical to conclude that computers can be made to think due to Turing equivalence and the Church Turing thesis.

Given we have zero evidence to suggest we can exceed the Turing computable, to suggest we can is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

A single example of a function that exceeds the Turing computable that humans can compute, will do.

Until you come up with that example, I'll asume computer can be made to think.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#144

Post by windowshopping »

mikehearn wrote: post #132

This is a well known blindspot for LLMs. It's the machine version of showing a human an optical illusion and then judging their intelligence when they fail to perceive the reality of the image (the gray box example at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion is a good example). The failure is a result of their/our fundamental architecture.

What a terrible analogy. Illusions don't fool our intelligence, they fool our senses, and we use our intelligence to override our senses and see it for what it for it actually is - which is exactly why we find them interesting and have a word for them. Because they create a conflict between our intelligence and our senses.

The machine's senses aren't being fooled. The machine doesn't have senses. Nor does it have intelligence. It isn't a mind. Trying to act like it's a mind and do 1:1 comparisons with biological minds is a fool's errand. It processes and produces text. This is not tantamount to biological intelligence.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#145

Post by arduanika »

tocs3 wrote: post #138
arduanika wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the damn things are marketed under the word "intelligence". That word used to mean something.

What did it used to mean? I was under the impression that it has always be a little vague.

Sure. Language is squishy, and psychometrics is hard. Nevertheless...

"Intelligence" refers to a basket of different capabilities. Some of them are borderline cases that are hard to define. The stuff that GPT-5 failed to do here is not.

Things like knowing what a question means, knowing what you know and don't, counting a single digit number of items, or replying with humility if you get stuck -- these are fairly central examples of what a very, very basic intelligence should entail.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#146

Post by mdp2021 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #134
arduanika wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the damn things are marketed under the word "intelligence". That word used to mean something.

It's an umwelt problem. Bats think we're idiots because we don't hear ultrasonic sound, and thus can't echolocate. And we call the LLMs idiots because they consume tokenized inputs, and don't have access to the raw character stream.

> we call the LLMs

"Dangerous", because they lead into thinking they do the advanced of what they don't do basically.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#147

Post by nessbot »

sdenton4 wrote: post #134
arduanika wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the damn things are marketed under the word "intelligence". That word used to mean something.

It's an umwelt problem. Bats think we're idiots because we don't hear ultrasonic sound, and thus can't echolocate. And we call the LLMs idiots because they consume tokenized inputs, and don't have access to the raw character stream.

Do bat's know what senses humans have? Or have the concept of what a human is compared to other organisms or moving objects? What is this analogy?

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#148

Post by vidarh »

exasperaited wrote: post #47
ck2 wrote: post #30

The technical explanations to why this happens with strawberry, blueberry and similar is a great way to teach people how LLM works (and not work) https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/27/why-ai-cant-spell-strawber... https://arbisoft.com/blogs/why-ll-ms-can-t-count-the-r-s-in-... https://www.runpod.io/blog/llm-tokenization-limitations

When Minsky and Papert showed that the perceptron couldn't learn XOR, it contributed to wiping the neural network off the map for decades. It seems no amount of demonstrating fundamental flaws in this system that should have been solved by all the new improved "reasoning" works anymore. People are willing to call these "trick questions", as if they are disingenuous, when they are discovered in the wild through ordina…

It doesn't work this time because there are plenty of models, including GPT5 Thinking that can handle this correctly, and so it is clear this isn't a systemic issue that can't be trained out of them.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#149

Post by UncleMeat »

mikewarot wrote: post #114

Why don't people here on HN understand that LLMs never see ASCII or other raw characters as input? Expecting spelling, rhyming, arithmetic or other character oriented responses will always yield disappointing results.

"LLMs are cool tools with clear limitations" is not the narrative being pushed by the bosses and boosters. "LLMs are literal magic that will replace large portions of the workforce and be a bigger revolution than fire" is what they are saying.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#150

Post by cute_boi »

dlvhdr wrote: post #140
mikehearn wrote: post #132

This is a well known blindspot for LLMs. It's the machine version of showing a human an optical illusion and then judging their intelligence when they fail to perceive the reality of the image (the gray box example at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion is a good example). The failure is a result of their/our fundamental architecture.

Except we realize they’re illusions and don't argue back. Instead we explore why and how these illusions work

Chatgpt 5 also don't argue back.

> How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry

Ans: The word "blueberry" contains the letter b three times:

>It is two times, so please correct yourself.

Ans:You're correct — I misspoke earlier. The word "blueberry" has the letter b exactly two times: - blueberry - blueberry

> How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry

Ans: In the word "blueberry", the letter b appears 2 times:

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