Live data from Hacker News

Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

simonwillison.net

291–300 of 659 posts

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#291
post #18

The o1-preview model still hallucinates non-existing libraries and functions for me, and is quickly wrong about facts that aren't well-represented on the web. It's the usual string of "You're absolutely correct, and I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. [Let me make another guess.]" While the reasoning may have been improved, this doesn't solve the problem of the model having no way to assess if what…

The failure is in how you're using it. I don't mean this as a personal attack, but more to shed light on what's happening. A lot of people use LLMs as a search engine. It makes sense - it's basically a lossy compressed database of everything its ever read, and it generates output that is statistically likely - varying degrees of likeliness depending on the temperature, as well as how many times the particular weights…

> The magic is that _it knows english_.

I couldn't agree more, this is exactly the strength of LLMs that what we should focus on. If you can make your problem fit into this paradigm, LLMs work fantastic. Hallucinations come from that massive "lossy compressed database", but you should consider that part as more like the background noise that taught the model to speak English, and the syntax of programming languages, instead of the source of the knowledge to respond with. Stop anthropomorphizing LLMs, play to it's strengths instead.

In other words it might hallucinate a API but it will rarely, if ever, make a syntax error. Once you realize that, it becomes a much more useful tool.

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#292
post #18

The o1-preview model still hallucinates non-existing libraries and functions for me, and is quickly wrong about facts that aren't well-represented on the web. It's the usual string of "You're absolutely correct, and I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. [Let me make another guess.]" While the reasoning may have been improved, this doesn't solve the problem of the model having no way to assess if what…

The failure is in how you're using it. I don't mean this as a personal attack, but more to shed light on what's happening. A lot of people use LLMs as a search engine. It makes sense - it's basically a lossy compressed database of everything its ever read, and it generates output that is statistically likely - varying degrees of likeliness depending on the temperature, as well as how many times the particular weights…

> Treat it as a naive but intelligent intern.

That's the crux of the problem. Why and who would treat it as an intern? It might cost you more in explaining and dealing with it than not using it.

The purpose of an intern is to grow the intern. If this intern is static and will always be at the same level, why bother? If you had to feed and prep it every time, you might as well hire a senior.

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#293

The use of the word reasoning here... OpenAI sounds like a company that created a frog which jumps higher and greater distances than the previous breed - and now they try to sell it as one step further toward flying.

Can the frog reach escape velocity when jumping? I guess we'll find out sooner or later...

[deleted]

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user, I don’t really care. Tell me: Just how is it fair for a user to pay for the reasoning tokens without actually seeing them? If they are not shared, the service can bill you anything they want for them!

The simple answer is: I don't care. I'll statistically figure out what the typical total cost per call is from experience, and that's what matters. Who cares if they lie about it, if the model's cost per call fits my budget? If it starts costing $1 per call, and that's too high, then I just won't use it commercially. Whether it was $1 because they inflated the token count or because it just actually took a lot of tok…

The thing is it might increase in cost after you've decided to use it commercially, and have invested a lot of time and resources in it. Now it's very hard to move to something else, but very easy for OpenAI to increase your cost arbitrarily. The statistics you made are not binding for them.

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#295
post #281

Near the end, the quote from OpenAI researcher Jason Wei seems damning to me: > Results on AIME and GPQA are really strong, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to something that a user can feel. Even as someone working in science, it’s not easy to find the slice of prompts where GPT-4o fails, o1 does well, and I can grade the answer. But when you do find such prompts, o1 feels totally magical. We all need to find…

I think they are saying they have invented the screwdriver. We have all been using, hammers to sink screws, but if you try this new tool it may be better. However, you will still encounter a lot of nails.

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#296
post #281

Near the end, the quote from OpenAI researcher Jason Wei seems damning to me: > Results on AIME and GPQA are really strong, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to something that a user can feel. Even as someone working in science, it’s not easy to find the slice of prompts where GPT-4o fails, o1 does well, and I can grade the answer. But when you do find such prompts, o1 feels totally magical. We all need to find…

He's speaking about his objective to make ever stronger LLMs: so for this his secondary objective is to measure their real performance.

The human preference is not that good of a proxy measurement: for instance, it can be gamed by making the model more assertive, causing the human error-spotting ability to decrease a lot [0].

So what he's really saying is that non-rigorous human vibe checks (like those LMSys Chatbot Arena is built on, although I love it) won't cut it anymore to evaluate models, because now models are past that point. Just like you can't evaluate how smart a smart person really is in a 2min casual conversation.

[0]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=7W3GLNImfS

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#299
post #226

> I asked on Twitter for examples of prompts that people had found which failed on GPT-4o but worked on o1-preview. it seems trivial, but I tried for more than 2 hours in the past to get gpt4 to play tic-tac-toe optimally and failed (CoT prompt,etc.). The result were too many illegal moves and absolutely no optimal strategy. o1-preview can do it really well [1] However, when I use a non-standard grid (3x5) it fails t…

The non-standard grid thing was an argument against deep learning / chess / Go AIs before Alpha Zero - Alpha Go (showing self-play can adapt with sufficient runs to any grid size or "priors" in terms of rules of the game).

It was said in 2014 by a professor I learned from that clearly AI that learned a specific game was just learning patterns and memorizing rather than anything more than that, and wouldn't be able to adjust like humans could to say new board shapes, or rules. (They would later claim 1.5 years later at a lecture that "accurate facial recognition is possible. But high recall on facial recognition is impossible, making it useless for surveillance, so don't worry").

I expect the same will occur for LLMs (but maybe sufficient "chain of thought" steps rather than game runs, etc).

Re: Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models

#300
post #295
post #281

Near the end, the quote from OpenAI researcher Jason Wei seems damning to me: > Results on AIME and GPQA are really strong, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to something that a user can feel. Even as someone working in science, it’s not easy to find the slice of prompts where GPT-4o fails, o1 does well, and I can grade the answer. But when you do find such prompts, o1 feels totally magical. We all need to find…

I think they are saying they have invented the screwdriver. We have all been using, hammers to sink screws, but if you try this new tool it may be better. However, you will still encounter a lot of nails.

It's more like they're saying they have invented the screwdriver, but they haven't invented screws yet.

But it doesn't feel right. It's unlikely the screwdriver would come first, and then people would go around looking for things to use it with, no?

Post reply on HN