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Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

science.org

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Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#191

Post by Sharlin »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #165
orbital-decay wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole point of AI is to create an intelligence modeled on humans and to compare it to humans. According to who? Everyone who's anyone is trying to create highly autonomous systems that do useful work. That's completely unrelated to modeling them on humans or comparing them to humans.

Go back and look at the history of AI, including current papers from the most advanced research teams. Nearly every component is based on humans - neural net - long/short term memory - attention - reasoning - activation function - learning - hallucination - evolutionary algorithm If you're just consuming an AI to build a React app then you don't have to care. If you are building an artificial intelligence then in pra…

What your examples show is that humans like to repurpose existing words to refer to new things based on generalizations or vague analogies. Not much more than that.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#192

Post by flir »

saurik wrote: post #159
orbital-decay wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole point of AI is to create an intelligence modeled on humans and to compare it to humans. According to who? Everyone who's anyone is trying to create highly autonomous systems that do useful work. That's completely unrelated to modeling them on humans or comparing them to humans.

But since these things are more like humans than computers, to build these autonomous systems you are going to have think in terms of full industrial engineering, not just software engineering: pretend you are dealing with a surprisingly bright and yet ever distracted employee who doesn't really care about their job and ensure that they are able to provide the structure you place them in value without danger to your…

It's got an instant-messaging interface.

If it had an autocomplete interface, you wouldn't be claiming that. Yet it would still be the same model.

(Nobody's arguing that Google Autocomplete is more human than software - at least, I hope they're not).

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#194

Post by fc417fc802 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #153
jonathanlydall wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many professionals with lower skilled jobs sometimes lean too heavily on pattern matching too. For example, customer service reps tend to often vaguely match your request with a possibly or only vaguely applicable templated response. Technically savvy customers who tend to try explain problems in detail are probably more likely to get an actually non-applicable canned response as the CS rep gets frustrated with the a…

> What is the next step here? The next step will be to walk you through clearing your browser cache and cookies. Because the CS rep has no idea who you are, and your protestations of competency fall on deaf ears because they've dealt with 23325424 people in the last year that claimed to know what they're doing but actually didn't at all. Their goal is to get through the script, because getting through the script is t…

The robots are even worse than the humans. Recently I got one when I called an ISP that insisted on calling back after restarting all the equipment and waiting 10 minutes. Never mind that the issue was entirely unrelated to the equipment. It had asked for a description of the problem but apparently couldn't actually do anything with that information. After refusing it enough times it simply hung up on me.

Obviously I don't do business with that company anymore.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#195

Post by akoboldfrying »

janalsncm wrote: post #190
ants_everywhere wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back and look at the history of AI, including current papers from the most advanced research teams. Nearly every component is based on humans - neural net - long/short term memory - attention - reasoning - activation function - learning - hallucination - evolutionary algorithm If you're just consuming an AI to build a React app then you don't have to care. If you are building an artificial intelligence then in pra…

Those terms sound similar to biological concepts but they’re very different. Neural networks are not like brains. They don’t grow new neurons. A “neuron” in an artificial neural net is represented with a single floating point number. Sometimes even quantized down to a 4 bit int. Their degrees of freedom are highly limited compared to a brain. Most importantly, the brain does not do back propagation like an ANN does.…

Neural networks are a lot like brains. That they don't generally grow new neurons is something that (a) could be changed with a few lines of code and (b) seems like an insignificant detail anyway.

> the brain does not do back propagation

Do we know this? Ruling this out is tantamount to claiming that we know how brains do learn. My suspicion is that we don't currently know, and that it will turn out that, e.g., sleep does something that is a coarse approximation of backprop.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#197

Post by littlestymaar »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #165
orbital-decay wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole point of AI is to create an intelligence modeled on humans and to compare it to humans. According to who? Everyone who's anyone is trying to create highly autonomous systems that do useful work. That's completely unrelated to modeling them on humans or comparing them to humans.

Go back and look at the history of AI, including current papers from the most advanced research teams. Nearly every component is based on humans - neural net - long/short term memory - attention - reasoning - activation function - learning - hallucination - evolutionary algorithm If you're just consuming an AI to build a React app then you don't have to care. If you are building an artificial intelligence then in pra…

Just because something is named after the name of a biological concept doesn't mean it has anything to do with the original thing the name was taken from.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#198

Post by NoahZuniga »

Seemingly this didn't make frontier models (gpt-o4, gemini-2.5-pro, etc) more likely to give a wrong answer (no stats are reported for failure rates on these models, but slow-down-rate is for similar models), however it does make them think longer sometimes.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01781

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#199

Post by fc417fc802 »

gowld wrote: post #142
jsrozner wrote: post #28

I love how science.org buries the actual content under four other things

The top story, that peacocks shoot frickin laser beams! is much more interesting than the LLM navel gazing story.

Thank you for mentioning that. I wouldn't have visited the link otherwise - I almost always go straight to arxiv. The official publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04039-8

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#200

Post by wizzwizz4 »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #195
janalsncm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those terms sound similar to biological concepts but they’re very different. Neural networks are not like brains. They don’t grow new neurons. A “neuron” in an artificial neural net is represented with a single floating point number. Sometimes even quantized down to a 4 bit int. Their degrees of freedom are highly limited compared to a brain. Most importantly, the brain does not do back propagation like an ANN does.…

Neural networks are a lot like brains. That they don't generally grow new neurons is something that (a) could be changed with a few lines of code and (b) seems like an insignificant detail anyway. > the brain does not do back propagation Do we know this? Ruling this out is tantamount to claiming that we know how brains do learn. My suspicion is that we don't currently know, and that it will turn out that, e.g., sleep…

No, we're pretty sure brains don't do backprop. See e.g. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-35221-w
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