Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 365 posts

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#271

Post by mallowdram »

morpheos137 wrote: post #249
mallowdram wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers are so close-minded, you can't see the freight train bearing down on the industry. All to science's advantage replacing engineers. Interestingly, if you dissect that last entry, I've just made the case measurement (analog computation) is superior to counting (binary computation) and laid out the strategy how. All it takes is brains, or an LLM to decipher what it states. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…

I 100% agree analog computing would be better at simulating intelligence than binary. Why don't you state that rather than burying it under a mountain of psychobabble?

Listing the conditions, dichotomizing the frameworks counting/measurement is the farthest from psycho-babble. Anyone with knowledge of analog knows these terms. And enough to know analog doesn't simulate anything. And intelligence isn't what's being targeted.

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#273

Post by cubefox »

devmor wrote: post #194
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to understand the human mind on a mechanistic level. You only need to examine how the whole organism learns, acts, and reacts to stimulus and situation. Even something as simple as catching a ball is basically predictive. You predict where the ball will be along its arc when it reaches a point in space where you can catch it. Then, strictly informed by that prediction, you solve a problem of motion thr…

> The major component of what we call intelligence is purely predictive. Making more unfounded, nonsensical claims does not reinforce your first unfounded, nonsensical claim. I'm sure statisticians would love it if the human mind were an inference machine, but that doesn't make it one. Your point of view on this is faith-based.

His view aligns both with a leading neuroscience explanation of the brain (predictive coding [1]) and with Active Inference / the Free Energy principle [2] from optimal control theory. A similar theory of intelligence, called H-JEPA (hierarchical joint embedding predictive architecture) [3] is also put forward by Yann LeCun, a major AI pioneer. Another AI pioneer, Jürgen Schmidhuber, subsequently criticized LeCun's theory, but not for being faulty, but for rehashing ideas published in several papers from the 1990s onward. [4]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle#Active_i...

3: https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

4: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/lecun-rehash-1990-2022.html

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#275

Post by codr7 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #176
skydhash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're using an LLM you need to think of yourself as an architect guiding a Junior to Mid Level developer. The thing is coding can (and should) be part of the design process. Many times, I though I have a good idea of what the solution should look like, then while coding, I got exposed more to the libraries and other parts of the code, which led me to a more refined approach. This exposure is what you will miss…

I agree. I mostly use it for scaffolding, I don't like letting it do all the work for me.

No friction, no improvements; that only guarantees you'll never find a better way to solve the problem.

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#276

Post by intended »

lxgr wrote: post #252
dragonwriter wrote: post #238

Thinking of an LLM as any kind of encyclopedia is probably the wrong model. LLMs are information presentation/processing tools that incidentally, as a consequence of the method by which they are built to do that, may occasionally produce factual information that is not directly prompted. If you want an LLM to be part of a tool that is intended to provide access to (presumably with some added value) encyclopedic infor…

Using artificial neural networks directly for information storage and retrieval (i.e. not just leveraging them as tools accessing other types of storage) is currently infeasible, agreed. On the other hand, biological neural networks are doing it all the time :) And there might well be an advantage to it (or a hybrid method), once we can make it more economical. After all, the embedding vector space is shaped by the d…

eh, bio neural networks aren't doing that all the time. Memmories are notorious for being "rebuilt" constantly.

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#278

Post by mind_heist »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #218
geye1234 wrote: post #192

Please, everybody, preserve your records. Preserve your books, preserve your downloaded files (that can't be tampered with), keep everything. AI is going to make it harder and harder to find out the truth about anything over the next few years. You have a moral duty to keep your books, and keep your locally-stored information.

I get very annoyed when llms respond with quotes around certain things I ask for, then when I say what is the source of that quote? they say oh I was paraphrasing and that isnt a real quote. At least wikipedia has sources that probably support what it says and normally the quotes are real quotes. LLMs just seem to add quotation marks as, "proof" that its confident something is correct.

do you have examples of these ?

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#279

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

Jensson wrote: post #190
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to understand the human mind on a mechanistic level. You only need to examine how the whole organism learns, acts, and reacts to stimulus and situation. Even something as simple as catching a ball is basically predictive. You predict where the ball will be along its arc when it reaches a point in space where you can catch it. Then, strictly informed by that prediction, you solve a problem of motion thr…

> The major component of what we call intelligence is purely predictive Then what is creativity? Creativity is not predictive and is the most important part of human intelligence, since it isn't about figuring out if a situation leads to good things, its about finding a new kind of situation that leads to good things. Don't say "we do totally random things and try to predict those outcomes", there is nothing supporti…

So we've got a temporal-spatial sense, a general predictive function, the capacity for abstraction, independent volition, and a sense of relational context.

Creativity shows up when an agent uses that predictive machinery not only to forecast immediate sensory consequences, but to (a) simulate many alternative internal models or actions (counterfactuals), usually in a self-directed way with an end or goal in mind, (b) predict how those alternatives will be interpreted by other agents or by itself in the future, and (c) select from those alternatives according to an intrinsic/extrinsic valuation that rewards novelty, surprise, utility, or aesthetic pleasure. In other words it's a form of guided meta-prediction.

From a very different perspective, the TRIZ guys have tried to figure out creativity, with results that are at least interesting. Ultimately, what they have to teach is that non-artistic creativity also takes certain characteristic forms.

Re: An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

#280

Post by prerok »

simonw wrote: post #43
latexr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my point is that “lossy” does not mean “unreliable”. LLMs aren’t reliable sources of facts, no argument there, but a true lossy encyclopaedia might be. Lossy algorithms don’t just make up and change information, they remove it from places where they might not make a difference to the whole. A lossy encyclopaedia might be one where, for example, you remove the images plus gramatical and phonetic information. Event…

I don't think a "true lossy encylopedia" is a thing that has ever existed.

Since sibling comments all seem to have concentrated on idealistic good intent, I would also like to point out a different side of things.

I grew up in socialism. Since we've transitioned to democracy, I learned that I have to unlearn some things. Our encyclopedias were not inaccurate but were not complete. It's like lying through omission. And as the old saying goes, half-truths are worse than lies.

Whether this would be deemed as a lossy encyclopedia, I don't know. What I am certain of, however, is that it was accurate but omitted important additional facts.

And that is what I see in LLMs as well. Overall, it's accurate, except in cases where an additional fact would alter the conclusion. So, it either could not find arguments with that fact, or it chose to ignore them to give an answer and could be prompted into taking them into account or whatever.

What I do know is that LLMs of today give me the same hibbie-jibbies that rereading those encyclopedias of my youth give me.

Post reply on HN