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Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

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Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t expect an LLM to get this right unless it had been trained on a solution. Am I wrong to think that? Are LLMs in the future going to be able to “think through” actual logic problems?

I don't think so. Consider the following conversation from UndiMix-v2-13B (a local LLM running on my Mac M1 via llama.cpp). It gets it wrong at first, but then gets it right with a little hint. I don't see how the hint could work if it was merely repeating an example it knew. User: Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have? Llama: Hello there! I'd be happy to help you…

The initial response had 2 problems - not counting Sally and counting sisters separately for each brother. Your hint pointed out the 1st problem, but then LLM should still provide wrong solution. This makes me think that maybe it would try another answer and explanation no matter what you said. If your reply was just "no, think again" it could also provide the right answer

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#222
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole point of the breakthrough related to the emergence of cognitive capabilities of LLMs. They are literally Markov chains. No one expected it to happen to this degree, but here we are.

People say that "they are literally Markov chains", but anyone who has looked at the code for LLMs knows that they are more complicated than that. I implemented Markov chains in BASIC in about ten lines of code in the 1980s on a 1 Mhz 64K Apple II after reading about the famous Mark V. Shaney hoax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney ). No neural nets or fancy GPUs required. It's one thing to stress that LL…

> People say that "they are literally Markov chains", but anyone who has looked at the code for LLMs knows that they are more complicated than that.

They are literally Markov chains according to the mathematical definition. The code is complicated. Having complicated code doesn't mean it's not literally a Markov chain.

> I implemented Markov chains in BASIC in about ten lines of code in the 1980s on a 1 Mhz 64K Apple II after reading about the famous Mark V. Shaney hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney). No neural nets or fancy GPUs required.

I don't doubt this. You can make a Markov chain by just counting the frequency of letters that follow each letter giving one that has a context window of one or two characters. That is a very simple Markov chain. You can make it by hand. You can make ones with more context window like a dozen characters or a few words, using sophisticated smoothing and regularization methods and not just frequency counts. Those are also simple Markov chains that you can do without neural net or GPU. Then you can also make a Markov chain that has a context window of thousands of tokens that is made from neural nets and massive training data and differentiable tensor computing libraries with data centers full of hardware linear algebra accelerators. Those are some even bigger Markov chains!

> LLMs are way more complicated than simple Markov chains.

That's true, they are more complicated than simple Markov chains, if by simple Markov chains you mean ones with small context window. LLMs are Markov chains with large context window!

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#223

Despite the hype about LLMs, many of the answers are pretty terrible. The 12-bar blues progressions seem mostly clueless. The question is will any of these ever get significantly better with time, or are they mostly going to stagnate?

The majority of these LLMs are not cutting edge, and many of them were designed for specific purposes other than answering prompts like these. I won't defend the level of hype coming from many corners, but it isn't fair to look at these responses to get the ceiling on what LLMs can do -- for that you want to look at only the best (GPT4, which is represented, and Bard, which isn't, essentially). Claude 2 (also represented) is in the next tier. None of the other models are at their level, yet.

You'd also want to look at models that are well-suited to what you're doing -- some of these are geared to specific purposes. Folks are pursuing the possibility that the best model would fully-internally access various skills, but it isn't known whether that is going to be the best approach yet. If it isn't, selecting among 90 (or 9 or 900) specialized models is going to be a very feasible engineering task.

> The 12-bar blues progressions seem mostly clueless.

I mean, it's pretty amazing that they many look coherent compared to the last 60 years of work at making a computer talk to you.

That being said, I played GPT4's chords and they didn't sound terrible. I don't know if they were super bluesy, but they weren't _not_ bluesy. If the goal was to build a music composition assistant tool, we can certainly do a lot better than any of these general models can do today.

> The question is will any of these ever get significantly better with time, or are they mostly going to stagnate?

No one knows yet. Some people think that GPT4 and Bard have reached the limits of what our datasets can get us, some people think we'll keep going on the current basic paradigm to AGI superintelligence. The nature of doing something beyond the limits of human knowledge, creating new things, is that no one can tell you for sure the result.

If they do stagnate, there are less sexy ways to make models perform well for the tasks we want them for. Even if the models fundamentally stagnate, we aren't stuck with the quality of answers we can get today.

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#224

Only tried chatGPT 3.5, but my god does it waffle on. Everything I ask ends with a paragraph saying "It's important to remember that..." like an after-school special from a 90s show. It can never just give you code, it has to say "Sure!, to {paraphase your question}, open a terminal...". It's interesting to see 20th century sci-fi depictions of this kind of AI/Search is being short and to the point. I guess they can'…

Yeah, I have tried a number of instructions to try to keep ChatGPT from blabbering and from sounding like a PR person. I haven't found the perfect incantation yet.

> It's interesting to see 20th century sci-fi depictions of this kind of AI/Search is being short and to the point.

Sci-fi told us that the AI would be so logical that you could just say a paradox aloud and it would blow up. What we got is something that can compose love poems all day but can't add three-digit numbers.

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that people are already firing real human workers to replace them with worse but cheaper LLMs, I'd argue that we're not talking about a competing technology, but that the competition is simply not firing your workforce. And, as an obligate customer of many large companies, you should be in favor of that as well. Most companies already automate, poorly, a great deal of customer service work; let us hope they do…

How many humans in your office do you think could solve the questions with better success ratio than GPT-4? I would say less than 20%. If the primary complaint is the blues that GPT-4 wrote is not that great, I think it is definitely worth the hype, given that a year before people argued that AI can never pass turing test.

Meaning, in your office, at least 1 out 5 will see and understand the imminent disaster and put this on halt, before this becomes an overwhelming catastrophe. The LLM, on the other hand, will confidently insist on everything being fine. Now consider your odds on having an office to go to, in a few months. (Mind that this is systemic issue.)

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with GPT-4 is that half the battle is knowing when to reset the context for a back-and-forth. For things like coding, after multiple revisions of code, it begins to get confused about which instance of the code/context to which it should refer. Resetting things back to a new frame with whatever the next query or request is generally resolves things. OpenAI’s “magic talking dog” aspect is making you beli…

3.5 (not surprisingly) has the same effect. I tend to ask for modifications on the 'latest' output. If I need to roll back to a previous version, (2-3 outputs back) I either copy & paste and ask ChatGPT it to ignore all other versions and focus on the one I just pasted, or if I don't need my in-between comments, I copy & paste the desired version on a new chat, and rename as "archive - code XYZ" for the previous one.

I’ve tried this as well, but it still seems to accumulate errors with subsequent responses, i.e. it will reset but then refer to the wrong context in the next response.

Re: Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions

#227
post #12

> Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have? The site reports every LLM as getting this wrong. But GPT4 seems to get it right for me: > Sally has 3 brothers. Since each brother has 2 sisters and Sally is one of those sisters, the other sister is the second sister for each brother. So, Sally has 1 sister.

From the ChatGPT app, using GPT-4 model, using my own custom prompt for such puzzles: “You are better than Marilyn Vos Savant at solving brain teaser logic puzzles step by step. Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?” Certainly! Let's break it down step by step: 1. Sally has 3 brothers. 2. Each of those brothers has two sisters. Since all the brothers share the sa…

I first asked GPT-4 “james (a boy) has four sisters, and each sister has three brothers. how many brothers does james have?”[0] and it told me 3 brothers. I then asked it to think though step by step and it said 2.

[0] https://chat.openai.com/share/859baa94-3edb-40f0-9c74-8b1403...

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