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Open Challenges in LLM Research

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Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#61
post #55

I have a hard time understanding why mechanistic interpretability has so few eyes on it. It's like trying to build a complex software system without logging or monitoring. Any other improvements you want to make on the system are going to just be trail and error with luck. The hallucination problem is one where interpretability of a model might be able to identify the failure modes that we need to address. Really any…

When I looked into this briefly my impression was that it's extremely hard to do mechanistic interpretation beyond very simple cases like CNN classification or toy problems like arithmetic in transformers. Not to say it's not a worthy pursuit, but I think the difficulty isn't justified for many researchers since the results won't make a big splash like a new model training result.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#62

Fun fact: I took the photo she used as a cover for one of her books, she asked me if she could use it and I said I'd like to be compensated and her response was something akin to "oh I was just asking assuming you'd say yes, I'm going to do it anyway". Nobody's perfect, maybe she regrets it, and it hasn't really crossed my mind in years, but I guess it still sort of irks me to be reminded of it. Anyway if anyone need…

Sounds like a pretty entitled and unpleasant person. At the bare minimum you should have had a say in whether you picture could hve been used.

Huh, that sounds like the arguments artists make for keeping their work out of training sets. :)

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#63
post #55

I have a hard time understanding why mechanistic interpretability has so few eyes on it. It's like trying to build a complex software system without logging or monitoring. Any other improvements you want to make on the system are going to just be trail and error with luck. The hallucination problem is one where interpretability of a model might be able to identify the failure modes that we need to address. Really any…

I'm going to talk out of my ass here because I am not involved enough to know the mechanics of how LLMs are really trained at any deep level, but from the surface level understanding I have, I would expect any attempt to eliminate hallucination to be intractable given the techniques in use. As far as I understand, the initial training run is simply fed raw text and it works on the basis of predicting a next token. Then these are find-tuned using RLHF and potentially other techniques I don't know much about.

To truly eliminate hallucinations, I would think you'd have to change the initial training phase. Rather than only feeding raw text and predicting next tokens, you'd need to feed propositions labeled with some probability that they are actually true. Doing this with real fidelity is clearly not possible. No one has a database of all fact claims quantified by probability of truth. But you could potentially use the same heuristics used by human learners and impart some encoding of hierarchy of evidence. Give high weight to claims made by professional scientific organizations, high but somewhat lesser to conclusions of large-scale meta-analyses in relatively mechanistic fields, give very low weight to comments on Reddit.

That is all entirely possible but the manual human labor required seems antithetical to the business goals of anyone actually doing this kind of research. Without it, though, you're seemingly limited to either playing whack-a-mole with fine tuning out specific classes of error when they're caught or relying on a dubious assumption that plausibly human-generated utterances you're trying to mimic are sufficiently more likely to be true than false.

This problem arguably goes away if people treat LLMs for what they are, generators of strings that look like plausible human-generated utterances, rather than generators of fact claims likely to be true. But if we really want strong AI, we clearly need the latter. There is a reason epistemologists have long defined knowledge as justified true belief, not just incidentally lucking into being correct.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#64
post #32

Looking back in 25 years, the "Hallucination Problem" will sound a lot like the "Frame Problem" of the 1970s. Looking back, it's a bit absurd to say that GOFAI would've got to AGI if only the Frame Problem could be solved. But the important point is why that sounds so absurd. It doesn't sound absurd because we found out that the frame problem can't be solved; that's beside the point. It also doesn't sound absurd beca…

My feeling is that GOFAI had a real problem with representing uncertainty, and handling contradiction. So, we tried to approach it theoretically, with fuzzy logic and probability and so on. But the theoretical research on uncertainty didn't reach any clear conclusion. Meanwhile, the neural nets (and ML) researchers just trucked on, with more compute power, and pretty much ignored any theoretical issues with uncertain…

That's an excellent summary I have to say. Theorists pushed hard to move the needle and practitioners with immense computing power reached and started chipping away at the same wall.

LLMs transpose the problem by mimicing what humans would do

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#65
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great motivation for academic researchers to find a way to train LLMs with less compute. Or maybe invent something better than transformers. A brain trains on 20 Watts after all.

That's a hardware difference. Brains run at a very low clock speed and make up for it with massive parallelism. They also don't suffer from the vonn neumann bottleneck - today's computers spend most of their time and energy shuffling the network in and out of memory. I believe that better hardware architectures will have more impact on AI than better neural network architectures.

Today's computers don't spend most of their time in I/O. Average CPU runs idle most of the time. I/O does not require CPU power. DMA exists since the 80s or whenever. Software and segmentation limits such as operating systems and traversal between execution rings are not the chemical hard barrier brains have.

You're correct that our architecture isn't adequate and biggest achievements lie there. I/O is not the problem, in fact, we have faster I/O. Because our I/O is dumb. We can place massive amounts of data in a linear memory buffer. But brains use massively associated memory structures. I/O of a network packet is easy. Associating that packet with preexisting context (such as TCP connection) is not that easy, requires structures, algorithms, memory locality, threading correctness, and procedural computing steps, because we abstract the context over a series of flat data.

If you're working on a subject hard, just a random flying info about something else that concerns you might trigger "I can't think about that right now" reaction in your brain, but the information has been digested. The packet has reached the adequate layer 7 ingress buffer just like that, but you don't want to context switch to the respective application intentionally.

There is also an elephant in the room and that is the native language, which shapes the way we think and process information. Imagine a CPU receiving an automatic microcode update the same moment when you as a programmer defined an abstract TCP stack in C or assembler, so it can optimize itself to the point of being able to switching to "thinking in TCP" mode.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#66

Looking back in 25 years, the "Hallucination Problem" will sound a lot like the "Frame Problem" of the 1970s. Looking back, it's a bit absurd to say that GOFAI would've got to AGI if only the Frame Problem could be solved. But the important point is why that sounds so absurd. It doesn't sound absurd because we found out that the frame problem can't be solved; that's beside the point. It also doesn't sound absurd beca…

"... .Looking back from the other side of the next Winter, the whole thing will seem a bit goofy."

for most of us, what we wish for is what we believe.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#67
post #26

Fun fact: I took the photo she used as a cover for one of her books, she asked me if she could use it and I said I'd like to be compensated and her response was something akin to "oh I was just asking assuming you'd say yes, I'm going to do it anyway". Nobody's perfect, maybe she regrets it, and it hasn't really crossed my mind in years, but I guess it still sort of irks me to be reminded of it. Anyway if anyone need…

Just another random anecdotal experience with Chip. I was interviewing with Claypot.ai and when I met her for my first conversation, she was on a walking treadmill and very clearly was more interested in a Slack conversation she was having. She moved me on to the next round which I irrefutably bombed and was respectfully told that I wouldn't be moving on which was the right decision, but I'll never forget watching he…

Are walking interviews a thing? I'd be very annoyed.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#68
The biggest challenge I’m trying to track isn’t on the list: online learning. The difficulties with getting LLMs to absorb new knowledge without catastrophic forgetting is a key factor making us so reliant on techniques like retrieval augmented generation. While RAG is very powerful, it’s only as good as the information retrieval step and context size, which quite often aren’t good enough.

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#69

"Never before in my life had I seen so many smart people working on the same goal" I'm not sure why but the assumptions and naivety in this opening line bothers me. There are plenty of goals and problems that orders of magnitude more people are working on today.

But the author hadn't seen them in their life

I think more people worked on the covid problem which was 3 years ago

Re: Open Challenges in LLM Research

#70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a hardware difference. Brains run at a very low clock speed and make up for it with massive parallelism. They also don't suffer from the vonn neumann bottleneck - today's computers spend most of their time and energy shuffling the network in and out of memory. I believe that better hardware architectures will have more impact on AI than better neural network architectures.

Pretend you have any hardware you want, today. What would you do with it? What model would you train? How do you know available hardware is the bottleneck and not model architecture?

Because with infinite hardware I'd be able to do neural architecture search and find the optimal model architecture.

And I'd be able to train a learned optimizer to replace gradient descent as the training process.

Even without either of those, performance improves in a predictable way with more compute thanks to scaling laws.

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