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What can LLMs never do?

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Re: What can LLMs never do?

#361

Post by nathan_compton »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #289
nathan_compton wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Since there is no objective definition of AGI or test for it, there’s no basis for any meaningful speculation on what can or cannot achieve it; discussions about it are quasi-religious, not scientific." This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception…

Sam Harris argues similarly in The Moral Landscape. There's this conception objective morality cannot exist outside of religion, because as soon as you're trying to prove one, philosophers rush with pedantic criticism that would render any domain of science invalid.

I kinda get where Sam Harris is coming from, but its kind of silly to call what he is talking about morality. As far as I can tell, Harris is just a moral skeptic who believes something like "we should get a bunch of people together to decide kind of what we want in the world and then rationally pursue those ends." But that is very different from morality as it was traditionally understood (eg, facts about behaviors which are objective in their assignment of good and bad).

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#362

Post by Xenoamorphous »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #322
empath-nirvana wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason it can't do that is that, for example, "twenty" and "20" are nearly identical in the vector embedding space and it can't really distinguish them that well in most contexts. That's true for generally any task that relies on sort of "how the words look" vs "what the words mean". Any kind of meta request is going to be very difficult for an LLM, but a multi-modal GPT model should be able to handle it.

Thanks, I’ll try the multimodal one.

Tried it, did not perform better than the non-multimodal one.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#363

Post by Scarblac »

naasking wrote: post #275
Scarblac wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your brain was first trained by reading all of the Internet? Anyway, the question of whether computers can think is as interesting as the question whether submarines can swim.

> Anyway, the question of whether computers can think is as interesting as the question whether submarines can swim. Given the amount of ink spilled on the question, gotta disagree with you there.

For the record, that wasn't me, it's a famous quote from Edsger Dijkstra.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#364

Post by scoot »

weebull wrote: post #346
scoot wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet ChatGPT 3.5 can tell me the nth letter of an arbitrary word…

...because it knows that the next token in the sequence "the 5th letter in the word _illusion_ is" happens to be "s". Not because it decomposed the word into letters.

It seems unlikely that such sequences exist for the majority of words. And I asked in English about Portuguese words.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#365

Post by donatj »

BoorishBears wrote: post #90
donatj wrote: post #62

I have been trying to generate some text recently using the ChatGPT API. No matter how I word “Include any interesting facts or anecdotes without commenting on the fact being interesting” it ALWAYS starts out “One interesting fact about” or similar phrasing. I have honestly spent multiple hours trying to word the prompt so it will stop including introductory phrases and just include the fact straight. I have gone so…

Have you tried a simple "No pretext or posttext, return the result in a code block"?

It's part of a larger prompt trying to get it to generate a couple paragraphs that include interesting facts. I want the facts in the context of the paragraphs.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#366

Post by crest »

autoexec wrote: post #358
PopePompus wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about general anesthesia? I had a major operation during which most of my brain was definitely offline for at least 8 hours.

Anesthesia shouldn't take your brain offline. It just makes you unconscious, paralyzes you, and gives you amnesia. Your brain is still active under general anesthesia. What you were thinking or feeling for those 8 hours was just forgotten.

[citation needed].

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#368

Post by int_19h »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #334
int_19h wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "stochastic parrot" crowd keeps repeating "it's just a token predictor!" like that somehow makes any practical difference whatsoever. Thing is, if it's a token predictor that consistently correctly predicts tokens that give the correct answer to, say, novel logical puzzles, then it is a reasoning token predictor, with all that entails.

This isn't correct and I am extremely concerned if this is the level of logic running billions of dollars.

Then please go ahead and explain how something can solve novel logical puzzles (i.e. ones that are not present in its training set) without some capacity for reasoning. You're claiming that it is "generating texts that looks like ..." - so what is the "..." in this case? I posit that the word that should be placed there is solution, and then you need to explain why that is not ipso facto a demonstration of the ability to reason.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#369

Post by fragmede »

kromem wrote: post #357
fragmede wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the boat is big enough to hold all the items I asked it > lion, goat, wolf riddle, but the boat is big enough to carry all of them and it said it could do it in one step. https://chat.openai.com/share/7b7a5462-7649-403d-a4f0-01c387... ChatGPT-4 today (April 28th, 2024) still fails at it sometimes: https://chat.openai.com/share/1bec923d-d727-42fe-ba9b-9f92b9... This is ChatGPT-4 getting it wrong, months ago: https://c…

Ah, ok. My variation is it's a vegetarian wolf, a carnivorous goat, and a cabbage. There's a few different hacks that will get it to work, but one of the more interesting is switching the nouns to emojis. But almost none of the models ever get it on the first try, and every major model since GPT-4 can have the prompt tweaked to get it with the exception of Llama-3, which I just can't get to solve it with anything I'v…

Oh that's a good one. Interesting that it's unable to get that right, because when I've tried asking it using a different theme (Star Trek on a shuttlecraft instead of a river, or an LOTR theme), and it's able to recognize that it's still the river crossing problem.

It's also inconsistent at solving the twist. Here's ChatGPT-4 getting it right and wrong within minutes of each other just today (April 29th, 2024).

right: https://chat.openai.com/share/178adc81-e43b-4ecf-b7b7-d7fa5a... wrong: https://chat.openai.com/share/9ae78081-c0eb-409d-93c6-650f37...

Have you tried

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#370

Post by autoexec »

crest wrote: post #366
autoexec wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anesthesia shouldn't take your brain offline. It just makes you unconscious, paralyzes you, and gives you amnesia. Your brain is still active under general anesthesia. What you were thinking or feeling for those 8 hours was just forgotten.

[citation needed].

You might try https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8054915/ which states: "General anesthesia is characterized by loss of consciousness, amnesia, analgesia, and immobility." and further down shows brain activity recorded while under anesthesia via EEG. The paper looks at the differences and similarities of brain activity while under anesthesia and sleep. This is only possible because, however changed or slowed by it, the brain is still active while under anesthesia
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