I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.
I am also surprised that training data are not much more curated. Encyclopedias, textbooks, reputable journals, newspapers and magazines make sense. But to throw in social media? Reddit? Seems insane.
Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
241–250 of 387 posts
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#242As I mentioned previously, I've seen Bing's LLM stall for about a minute when asked something iffy but uncommon. I wonder if Bing is outsourcing questionable LLM results to humans. Anyone else seeing this?
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Whether a person should eat a certain number of small rocks each day is not a matter of opinion, it's not a deep philosophical problem and it's not a question whose truth is not resolveable. You should not be eating rocks.
You choose such an edge case question - how about this sort of thing: Which is the best political party? Are the side effects to X medical treatment? I bet there are even cases when eating rocks is ok! PS It has been written about: https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-... > Lithophagia is a subset of geophagia and is a habit of eating pebbles or rocks. In the setting of famine and poverty, cons…
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or to put it another way, I think Google should have a way of saying "yes, we know this result is wrong, but we're leaving it in because it's funny." There is a demand for funny results. Someone asking “how many rocks should I eat” is looking for entertainment, so you might as well give it to them.
The right answer is no rocks. Some mentally ill person could type that in and get "eat 1000 rocks" and then die from eating rocks, and that would be Google's fault. It's not funny. I have no doubt right now there are at least 50 youtube videos being made testing different glue's effectiveness holding cheese on a pizza. And some of those idiots are going to taste-test it, too. And then people will try it at home, some…
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear he is saying that the LLM is not capable of justified true belief, not commenting on people who believe LLM output. I don’t think your comment is relevant here.
That reading of the comment did occur to me, but I think neither dictionaries nor LLMs are capable of belief, and the comment was about the status of beliefs derived from them.
A dictionary or a reputable Wikipedia entry or whatever is ultimately full of human-edited text where, presuming good faith, the text is written according to that human's rational understanding, and humans are capable of justified true belief. This is not the case at all with an LLM; the text is entirely generated by an entity which is not capable of having justified true beliefs in the same way that humans and rats have justified true beliefs. That is why text from an LLM is more suspect than text from a dictionary.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing of the sort. I'm trying to understand why anyone cares about formal verifiability in this context, since it's not something we rely on when asking humans to answer questions for us. We evaluate any answer we get without such mathematical proofs, and instead simply judge the answer we're given on its fit and usefulness. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of even these nascent LLMs is fooling themselves. The proo…
> since it's not something we rely on when asking humans to answer questions for us Because we interact with computers (which includes LLMs) differently than we do with humans and we hold them to higher standards Ironically, Google played a large part in this, delivering high quality results to us with ease for many years. At one point Google was the standard for finding high quality information
To the extent that anyone avoids employing these technologies, they will be at a disadvantage to those who do; because these tools just work. Already. Today.
There isn't even room for debate on that issue. Again, the proof is in the pudding. These systems are already successfully, usefully, and correctly answering millions of questions a day. They have failure modes where they produce substandard or even flat out incorrect answers too. They're far from perfect, but they're still incredible tools, even without waiting for the improvements that are sure to come.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that 90% of Reddit isn't garbage. It's really useful. Problem is Google can't tell what is garbage or not. No LLM can.
> Except that 90% of Reddit isn't garbage. It's really useful. Citation needed. I've been a Reddit user since its inception and honestly except for niche hobby subreddits, Reddit is mostly low effort garbage, bots and rehashed content. I'd wager that mainstream subreddits are 99% garbage for training an LLM for anything other than shitposting.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Search" isn't Google's product. Google hasn't been a search company for 20 years. "Ads" is Google's product. And the only way they'll go bankrupt is if 1) companies realize that advertising is pointless (I'm not holding my breath), or 2) some other company takes over from Google, which seems unlikely without government intervention (I'm not holding my breath). Google is a shit company, but they'll still be around 20…
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Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reading of the comment did occur to me, but I think neither dictionaries nor LLMs are capable of belief, and the comment was about the status of beliefs derived from them.
Okay we are speaking past each other, and you are still misunderstanding the subtlety of the comment: A dictionary or a reputable Wikipedia entry or whatever is ultimately full of human-edited text where, presuming good faith, the text is written according to that human's rational understanding, and humans are capable of justified true belief. This is not the case at all with an LLM; the text is entirely generated by…
The point you make might be regarded as an argument about the first question. In each case, the ‘chain of custody’ (as the parent comment put it) is compared and some condition is proposed. The condition explicitly considered in the first question was reliability; it was suggested that reliability is not enough, because it isn’t justification (which we can understand pretheoretically, ignoring the post-Gettier literature). My point was that we can’t circumvent the post-Gettier literature because at least one seemingly plausible view of justification is just reliability, and so that needs to be rejected Gettier-style (see e.g. BonJour on clairvoyance). The condition one might read into your point here is something like: if in the ‘chain of custody’ some text is generated by something that is incapable of belief, the text at the end of the chain loses some sort of epistemic virtue (for example, beliefs acquired on reading it may not amount to knowledge). Thus,
> text from an LLM is more suspect than text from a dictionary.
I am not sure that this is right. If I have a computer generate a proof of a proposition, I know the proposition thereby proved, even though ‘the text is entirely generated by an entity which is not capable of having justified true beliefs’ (or, arguably, beliefs at all). Or, even more prosaically, if I give a computer a list of capital cities, and then write a simple program to take the name of a country and output e.g. ‘[t]he capital of France is Paris’, the computer generates the text and is incapable of belief, but, in many circumstances, it is plausible to think that one thereby comes to know the fact output.
I don’t think that that is a reductio of the point about LLMs, because the output of LLMs is different from the output of, for example, an algorithm that searches for a formally verified proof, and the mechanisms by which it is generated also are.