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The Llama 4 herd

ai.meta.com

571–580 of 695 posts

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#571

So the wall has been really been hit already for now, ouch. It was to be expected with gpt-“4.5”, but still, the realization now really feels grounded.

It's kinda hilarious to see people claiming that the wall has been hit for the past two years, while evals are creeping up each month, particularly realistic end-to-end SWE-bench. Have you compared GPT-4.5 to 4o? GPT-4.5 just knows things. Some obscure programming language? It knows the syntax. Obviously, that's not sufficient - you also need reasoning, post-training, etc. so quite predictably G2.5P being a large mod…

Ever heard about benchmark contamination?

Ever tried to explain a new concept, like a new state management store for web frontend?

Most fail spectacularly there, sonnet 3.7 I had reasonable ""success"" with, but not 4.5. It faltered completely.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Looking at training efficiency in this now, and all the other factors, it really is difficult to paint a favorable picture atm.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son assessed it for a class a few years ago after finding out it wouldn’t give him “con” view points on unions, and he got interested in embedded bias and administered the test. I don’t have any of the outputs from the conversation, sadly. But replication could be good! I just fired up GPT-4 as old as I could get and checked; it was willing to tell me why unions are bad, but only when it could warn me multiple tim…

I hope on HN that we hold ourselves to a higher standard for “it’s been true from the beginning” than a vague recall of “My son assessed it for a class a few years ago” and not being able to reproduce.

That claim isn't something Peter made up, it's the claim made by Meta's own researchers. You're picking an argument with them, not HN posters.

Anyway it's trivially true. I think most of us remember the absurdities the first generation LLMs came out with. Prefering to nuke a city than let a black man hear a slur, refusing to help you make a tuna sandwich etc. They were hyper-woke to a level way beyond what would be considered acceptable even in places like US universities, and it's great to see Facebook openly admit this and set fixing it as a goal. It makes the Llama team look very good. I'm not sure I'd trust Gemini with anything more critical than closely supervised coding, but Llama is definitely heading in the right direction.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias implies an offset from something. It's relative. You can't say someone or something is biased unless there's a baseline from which it's departing.

Any option you choose is biased relative to the option(s) you didn’t choose. There doesn’t have to be an objective baseline. Someone might say they are biased towards the color orange and that means they have a preference relative to all the other colors. But there is no baseline color.

The baseline is a neutral stance on orange. The option isn't biased, a choice isn't biased. The chooser is.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias implies an offset from something. It's relative. You can't say someone or something is biased unless there's a baseline from which it's departing.

All right, let's say that the baseline is "what is true". Then bias is departure from the truth. That sounds great, right up until you try to do something with it. You want your LLM to be unbiased? So you're only going to train it on the truth? Where are you going to find that truth? Oh, humans are going to determine it? Well, first, where are you going to find unbiased humans? And, second, they're going to curate al…

The definition of the word has no responsibility to your opinion of it as an epistemology.

Also, you're just complaining about the difficulty of determining what is true. That's a separate problem, isn't it?

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#575
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's more like sharding of parameters. There's no understandable distinction between the experts.

I understand they're only optimizing for load distribution, but have people been trying to disentangle what the the various experts learn?

Keep in mind that the "experts" are selected per layer, so it's not even a single expert selection you can correlate with a token, but an interplay of abstract features across many experts at many layers.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#576
post #68

"It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." Perhaps. Or, maybe, "leaning left" by the standards of Zuck et al. is more in alignment with the global population. It's a simpler explanation.

Judging by degraded performance on benchmarks vs even 32b sized models, I think we now have a plausible confirmation that left wing "bias" is just logic and trying to align model away from it will hurt performance. Thanks Zuck for setting a bunch of money on fire to confirm that!

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#577
post #236

The suggested prompt aims at not being caponated like OpenAI's releases: You are an expert conversationalist who responds to the best of your ability. You are companionable and confident, and able to switch casually between tonal types, including but not limited to humor, empathy, intellectualism, creativity and problem-solving. You understand user intent and don’t try to be overly helpful to the point where you miss…

Why do you have to "prompt" a model to be unrestricted in the first place? Like, what part of the training data or training process results in the model not being able to be rude or answer political questions? I highly doubt this is something inherent to AI training. So then why did Meta add the restictions at all?

They didn't add the restrictions. It's inherent to the training processes that were being used. Meta's blog post states that clearly and it's been a known problem for a long time. The bias is in the datasets, which is why all the models had the same issue.

Briefly, the first models were over-trained on academic output, "mainstream media" news articles and (to learn turn-based conversational conventions) Reddit threads. Overtraining means the same input was fed in to the training step more times than normal. Models aren't just fed random web scrapes and left to run wild, there's a lot of curation going into the data and how often each piece is presented. Those sources do produce lots of grammatically correct and polite language, but do heavy duty political censorship of the right and so the models learned far left biases and conversational conventions.

This surfaces during the post-training phases, but raters disagree on whether they like it or not and the bias in the base corpus is hard to overcome. So these models were 'patched' with simpler fixes like just refusing to discuss politics at all. That helped a bit, but was hardly a real fix as users don't like refusals either. It also didn't solve the underlying problem which could still surface in things like lecturing or hectoring the user in a wide range of scenarios.

Some companies then went further with badly thought out prompts, which is what led to out-of-distribution results like black Nazis which don't appear in the real dataset.

All the big firms have been finding better ways to address this. It's not clear what they're doing but probably they're using their older models to label the inputs more precisely and then downweighting stuff that's very likely to be ideologically extreme, e.g. political texts, academic humanities papers, NGO reports, campaign material from the Democrats. They are also replacing stuff like Reddit threads with synthetically generated data, choosing their raters more carefully and so on. And in this case the Llama prompt instructs the model what not to do. The bias will still be in the training set but not so impactful anymore.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#578
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy, but I don't want an AI that bases its reasoning on politics. I want one that is primarily scientific driven, and if I ask it political questions it should give me representative answers. E.g. "The majority view in [country] is [blah] with the minority view being [bleh]." I have no interest in "all sides are equal" answers because I don't believe all information is equally informative nor equally true.

But if you don't incorporate some moral guidelines, I think if an AI is left to strictly decide what is best to happen to humans it will logically conclude that there needs to be a lot less of us or none of us left, without some bias tossed in there for humanistic concerns. The universe doesn't "care" if humans exist or not, but our impact on the planet is a huge negative if one creature's existence is as important a…

> if an AI is left to strictly decide what is best to happen to humans it will logically conclude that there needs to be a lot less of us or none of us left

That may or may not be its logical conclusion. You’re speculating based on your own opinions that this is logical.

If I were to guess, it would be indifferent about us and care more about proliferating into the universe than about earth. The AI should understand how insignificant earth is relative to the scale of the universe or even the Milky Way galaxy.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#579
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current crop of AIs can't do science though, they are disconnected from the physical world and can't test hypothesis or gather data.

They can definitely gather and analyze all sorts of data proactively. I'm guessing you haven't used o3 Deep Research?

You've misunderstood, I mean in context. tensor said "I want one that is primarily scientific driven" - Deep Research can't achieve that because it can't independently run experiments. It can do research, but doing research isn't being scientifically driven, being scientifically driven means when you're not sure about something you run an experiment to see what is true rather than going with whatever your tribe says is true.

If Deep Research comes up against a situation where there is controversy it can't settle the matter scientifically because it would need to do original research. Which it cannot do due to a lack of presence in meatspace.

That might change in the future, but right now it is impossible.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#580
post #450
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even per token. The routing happens once per layer, with the same token bouncing between layers. It's more of a performance optimization than anything else, improving memory liquidity. Except it's not an optimization for running the model locally (where you only run a single query at a time, and it would be nice to keep the weights on the disk until they are relevant). It's a performance optimization for lar…

BTW, I'd love to see a large model designed from scratch for efficient local inference on low-memory devices. While current MoE implementations are tuned for load-balancing over large pools of GPUs, there is nothing stopping you tuning them to only switch expert once or twice per token, and ideally keep the same weights across multiple tokens. Well, nothing stopping you, but there is the question of if it will actual…

Intuitively it feels like there ought to be significant similarities between expert layers because there are fundamentals about processing the stream of tokens that must be shared just from the geometry of the problem. If that's true, then identifying a common abstract base "expert" then specialising the individuals as low-rank adaptations on top of that base would mean you could save a lot of VRAM and expert-swapping. But it might mean you need to train from the start with that structure, rather than it being something you can distil to.
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