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

History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 452 posts

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#291

Post by empath75 »

Mumps wrote: post #287
frahs wrote: post #97

Wait so what does the model think that it is? If it doesn't know computers exist yet, I mean, and you ask it how it works, what does it say?

This is an anthropomorphization. LLMs do not think they are anything, no concept of self, no thinking at all (despite the lovely marketing around thinking/reasoning models). I'm quite sad that more hasn't been done to dispel this. When you ask gpt 4.1 et c to describe itself, it doesn't have singular concept of "itself". It has some training data around what LLMs are in general and can feed back a reasonable response…

Well, part of an LLM's fine tuning is telling it what it is, and modern LLMs have enough learned concepts that it can produce a reasonably accurate description of what it is and how it works. Whether it knows or understands or whatever is sort of orthogonal to whether it can answer in a way consistent with it knowing or understanding what it is, and current models do that.

I suspect that absent a trained in fictional context in which to operate ("You are a helpful chatbot"), it would answer in a way consistent with what a random person in 1914 would say if you asked them what they are.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#292

Post by [deleted] »

DGoettlich wrote: post #273
seizethecheese wrote: post #119

> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. Hell yeah, sold, let’s go… > We're developing a responsible access fra…

understand your frustration. i trust you also understand the models have some dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project. if you have ideas on how we could make the models more broadly accessible while avoiding that risk, please do reach out @ history-llms@econ.uzh.ch

[deleted]

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#293

Post by myrmidon »

kazinator wrote: post #50

> Why not just prompt GPT-5 to "roleplay" 1913? Because it will perform token completion driven by weights coming from training data newer than 1913 with no way to turn that off. It can't be asked to pretend that it wasn't trained on documents that didn't exist in 1913. The LLM cannot reprogram its own weights to remove the influence of selected materials; that kind of introspection is not there. Not to mention that…

I do agree with this and think it is an important point to stress.

But we don't know how much different/better human (or animal) learning/understanding is, compared to current LLMs; dismissing it as meaningless token prediction might be premature, and underlying mechanisms might be much more similar than we'd like to believe.

If anyone wants to challenge their preconceptions along those lines I can really recommend reading Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology (1984)".

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#294

Post by naasking »

DGoettlich wrote: post #273
seizethecheese wrote: post #119

> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. Hell yeah, sold, let’s go… > We're developing a responsible access fra…

understand your frustration. i trust you also understand the models have some dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project. if you have ideas on how we could make the models more broadly accessible while avoiding that risk, please do reach out @ history-llms@econ.uzh.ch

What are the legal or other ramifications of people misrepresenting the goals of your project? What is it you're worried about exactly?

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#296

Post by paddleon »

p-e-w wrote: post #207
bondarchuk wrote: post #204

> Historical texts contain racism, antisemitism, misogyny, imperialist views. The models will reproduce these views because they're in the training data. This isn't a flaw, but a crucial feature—understanding how such views were articulated and normalized is crucial to understanding how they took hold. Yes! > We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purp…

It’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results. I’ve never been as unimpressed by scientists as I have been in the past five years or so. “We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so…

> “We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so with a heavy heart, we decided that we cannot just publish it.”

Or, how about, "If we release this as is, then some people will intentionally mis-use it and create a lot of bad press for us. Then our project will get shut down and we lose our jobs"

Be careful assuming it is a power trip when it might be a fear trip.

I've never been as unimpressed by society as I have been in the last 5 years or so.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#297

Post by ACCount37 »

p-e-w wrote: post #275
patapong wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more likely they are terrified of someone making a prompt that gets the model to say something racist or problematic (which shouldn't be too hard), and the backlash they could receive as a result of that.

Is there anyone with a spine left in science? Or are they all ruled by fear of what might be said if whatever might happen?

Selection effects. If showing that you have a spine means getting growth opportunities denied to you, and not paying lip service to current politics in grant applications means not getting grants, then anyone with a spine would tend to leave the field behind.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#298

Post by paddleon »

p-e-w wrote: post #275
patapong wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more likely they are terrified of someone making a prompt that gets the model to say something racist or problematic (which shouldn't be too hard), and the backlash they could receive as a result of that.

Is there anyone with a spine left in science? Or are they all ruled by fear of what might be said if whatever might happen?

maybe they are concerned by the widespread adoption of the attitude you are taking-- make a very strong accusation, then when it was pointed out that the accusation might be off base, continue to attack.

This constant demonization of everyone who disagrees with you, makes me wonder if 28 Days wasn't more true than we thought, we are all turning into rage zombies.

p-e-w, I'm reacting to much more than your comments. Maybe you aren't totally infected yet, who knows. Maybe you heal.

I am reacting to the pandemic, of which you were demonstrating symptoms.

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#299

Post by crazygringo »

vintermann wrote: post #155
crazygringo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my first question too. When I first started using LLM's, I was amazed at how thoroughly it understood what it itself was, the history of its development, how a context window works and why, etc. I was worried I'd trigger some kind of existential crisis in it, but it seemed to have a very accurate mental model of itself, and could even trace the steps that led it to deduce it really was e.g. the ChatGPT it had…

I imagine it would get into spiritism and more exotic psychology theories and propose that it is an amalgamation of the spirit of progress or something.

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd be curious about. Or would it think it was a library that had been ensouled or something like that. Or would it conclude that the explanation could only be religious, that it was some kind of angel or spirit created by god?

Re: History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

#300

Post by crazygringo »

LiKao wrote: post #183
9dev wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t understand anything, they just have text in the training data to answer these questions from. Having existential crises is the privilege of actual sentient beings, which an LLM is not.

They might behave like ChatGPT when queried about the seahorse emoji, which is very similar to an existential crisis.

Exactly. Maybe a better word is "spiraling", when it thinks it has the tools to figure something out but can't, and can't figure out why it can't, and keeps re-trying because it doesn't know what else to do.

Which is basically what happens when a person has an existential crisis -- something fundamental about the world seems to be broken, they can't figure out why, and they can't figure out why they can't figure it out, hence the crisis seems all-consuming without resolution.

Post reply on HN