• Technoworcester@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    4 hours ago

    'is weirder than you thought ’

    I am as likely to click a link with that line as much as if it had

    ‘this one weird trick’ or ‘side hussle’.

    I would really like it if headlines treated us like adults and got rid of click baity lines.

    • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 hours ago

      But then you wouldn’t need to click on thir Ad infested shite website where 1-2 paragraphs worth of actual information is stretched into a giant essay so that they can show you more Ads the longer you scroll

      • Tony Wu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        It really is quite unfortunate, I wish titles do what titles are supposed to do instead of being baits.but you are right, even consciously trying to avoid clicking sometimes curiosity gets the best of me. But I am improving.

  • cholesterol@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    3 hours ago

    you can’t trust its explanations as to what it has just done.

    I might have had a lucky guess, but this was basically my assumption. You can’t ask LLMs how they work and get an answer coming from an internal understanding of themselves, because they have no ‘internal’ experience.

    Unless you make a scanner like the one in the study, non-verbal processing is as much of a black box to their ‘output voice’ as it is to us.

  • dkc@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    6 hours ago

    The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.

  • perestroika@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    5 hours ago

    Wow, interesting. :)

    Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    67
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    20 hours ago

    “Ask Claude to add 36 and 59 and the model will go through a series of odd steps, including first adding a selection of approximate values (add 40ish and 60ish, add 57ish and 36ish). Towards the end of its process, it comes up with the value 92ish. Meanwhile, another sequence of steps focuses on the last digits, 6 and 9, and determines that the answer must end in a 5. Putting that together with 92ish gives the correct answer of 95,” the MIT article explains."

    That is precisrly how I do math. Feel a little targeted that they called this odd.

    • JayGray91@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      10 hours ago

      I think it’s odd in the sense that it’s supposed to be software so it should already know what 36 plus 59 is in a picosecond, instead of doing mental arithmetics like we do

      At least that’s my takeaway

      • shawn1122@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        4 hours ago

        This is what the ARC-AGI test by Chollet has also revealed of current AI / LLMs. They have a tendency to approach problems with this trial and error method and can be extremely inefficient (in their current form) with anything involving abstract / deductive reasoning.

        Most LLMs do terribly at the test with the most recent breakthrough being with reasoning models. But even the reasoning models struggle.

        ARC-AGI is simple, but it demands a keen sense of perception and, in some sense, judgment. It consists of a series of incomplete grids that the test-taker must color in based on the rules they deduce from a few examples; one might, for instance, see a sequence of images and observe that a blue tile is always surrounded by orange tiles, then complete the next picture accordingly. It’s not so different from paint by numbers.

        The test has long seemed intractable to major AI companies. GPT-4, which OpenAI boasted in 2023 had “advanced reasoning capabilities,” didn’t do much better than the zero percent earned by its predecessor. A year later, GPT-4o, which the start-up marketed as displaying “text, reasoning, and coding intelligence,” achieved only 5 percent. Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.7, flagship models from Google and Anthropic, achieved 5 and 14 percent, respectively.

        https://archive.is/7PL2a

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        60
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Fascist. If someone does maths differently than your preference, it’s not “weird shit”. I’m facile with mental math despite what’s perhaps a non-standard approach, and it’s quite functional to be able to perform simple to moderate levels of mathematics mentally without relying on a calculator.

  • Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    14 hours ago

    Another very surprising outcome of the research is the discovery that these LLMs do not, as is widely assumed, operate by merely predicting the next word. By tracing how Claude generated rhyming couplets, Anthropic found that it chose the rhyming word at the end of verses first, then filled in the rest of the line.

    If the llm already knows the full sentence it’s going to output from the first word it “guesses” I wonder if you could short circuit it and say just give the full sentence instead of doing a cycle for each word of the sentence, could maybe cut down on llm energy costs.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      4 hours ago

      interestingly, too, this is a technique when you’re improvising songs, it’s called Target Rhyming.

      The most effective way is to do A / B^1 / C / B^2 rhymes. You pick the B^2 rhyme, let’s say, “ibruprofen” and you get all of A and B^1 to think of a rhyme

      Oh its Christmas time
      And I was up on my roof when
      I heard a jolly old voice
      Ask me for ibuprofen

      And the audience thinks you’re fucking incredible for complex rhymes.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 hours ago

      I don’t think it knows the full sentence, it just doesn’t search for the words in the order they will be in the sentence. It finds the end-words first to make the poem rhyme, than looks for the rest of the words. I do it this way as well just like many other people trying to create any kind of rhyming text.

  • harryprayiv@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    149
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    To understand what’s actually happening, Anthropic’s researchers developed a new technique, called circuit tracing, to track the decision-making processes inside a large language model step-by-step. They then applied it to their own Claude 3.5 Haiku LLM.

    Anthropic says its approach was inspired by the brain scanning techniques used in neuroscience and can identify components of the model that are active at different times. In other words, it’s a little like a brain scanner spotting which parts of the brain are firing during a cognitive process.

    This is why LLMs are so patchy at math. (Image credit: Anthropic)

    Anthropic made lots of intriguing discoveries using this approach, not least of which is why LLMs are so terrible at basic mathematics. “Ask Claude to add 36 and 59 and the model will go through a series of odd steps, including first adding a selection of approximate values (add 40ish and 60ish, add 57ish and 36ish). Towards the end of its process, it comes up with the value 92ish. Meanwhile, another sequence of steps focuses on the last digits, 6 and 9, and determines that the answer must end in a 5. Putting that together with 92ish gives the correct answer of 95,” the MIT article explains.

    But here’s the really funky bit. If you ask Claude how it got the correct answer of 95, it will apparently tell you, “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” But that actually only reflects common answers in its training data as to how the sum might be completed, as opposed to what it actually did.

    In other words, not only does the model use a very, very odd method to do the maths, you can’t trust its explanations as to what it has just done. That’s significant and shows that model outputs can not be relied upon when designing guardrails for AI. Their internal workings need to be understood, too.

    Another very surprising outcome of the research is the discovery that these LLMs do not, as is widely assumed, operate by merely predicting the next word. By tracing how Claude generated rhyming couplets, Anthropic found that it chose the rhyming word at the end of verses first, then filled in the rest of the line.

    “The planning thing in poems blew me away,” says Batson. “Instead of at the very last minute trying to make the rhyme make sense, it knows where it’s going.”

    Anthropic discovered that their Claude LLM didn’t just predict the next word. (Image credit: Anthropic)

    Anthropic also found, among other things, that Claude “sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal ‘language of thought’.”

    Anywho, there’s apparently a long way to go with this research. According to Anthropic, “it currently takes a few hours of human effort to understand the circuits we see, even on prompts with only tens of words.” And the research doesn’t explain how the structures inside LLMs are formed in the first place.

    But it has shone a light on at least some parts of how these oddly mysterious AI beings—which we have created but don’t understand—actually work. And that has to be a good thing.

    • hikaru755@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      “The planning thing in poems blew me away,” says Batson. “Instead of at the very last minute trying to make the rhyme make sense, it knows where it’s going.”

      How is this surprising, like, at all? LLMs predict only a single token at a time for their output, but to get the best results, of course it makes absolute sense to internally think ahead, come up with the full sentence you’re gonna say, and then just output the next token necessary to continue that sentence. It’s going to re-do that process for every single token which wastes a lot of energy, but for the quality of the results this is the best approach you can take, and that’s something I felt was kinda obvious these models must be doing on one level or another.

      I’d be interested to see if there are massive potentials for efficiency improvements by making the model able to access and reuse the “thinking” they have already done for previous tokens

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      70
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      24 hours ago

      Is that a weird method of doing math?

      I mean, if you give me something borderline nontrivial like, say 72 times 13, I will definitely do some similar stuff. “Well it’s more than 700 for sure, but it looks like less than a thousand. Three times seven is 21, so two hundred and ten, so it’s probably in the 900s. Two times 13 is 26, so if you add that to the 910 it’s probably 936, but I should check that in a calculator.”

      Do you guys not do that? Is that a me thing?

        • Manticore@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          30 minutes ago

          I might. Then I can subtract 74 to get 74*14, and subtract 28 to get 72*13.

          I don’t generally do that to ‘weird’ numbers, I usually get closer to multiples of 5, 9, 10, or 11.

          But a computer stores information differently. Perhaps it moves closer to numbers with simpler binary addresses.

      • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        11 hours ago

        How I’d do it is basically

        72 * (10+3)

        (72 * 10) + (72 * 3)

        (720) + (3*(70+2))

        (720) + (210+6)

        (720) + (216)

        936

        Basically I break the numbers apart into easier chunks and then add them together.

        • Manticore@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          28 minutes ago

          This is what I do, except I would add 700 and 236 at the end.

          Well except I would probably add 700 and 116 or something, because my working memory fucking sucks and my brain drops digits very easily when there’s more than 1

      • Mac@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        10 hours ago

        I wouldn’t even attempt that in my head.
        I can’t keep track of things and then recall them later for the final result.

        • HereIAm@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          7 hours ago

          Pen and paper maths I’m pretty decent at, but ask me to calculate anything in my head and it’s anyone’s guess if I remembered to carry the 1 or not. Ever since learning about aphantasia I’m wondering if the lack of being able to visually store values has something to do with it.

          • futatorius@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            6 hours ago

            Ever since learning about aphantasia I’m wondering if the lack of being able to visually store values has something to do with it.

            Here’s some anecdotal evidence. Until I was 12 or 13, I could do absurdly complex arithmetical calculations in my head. My memory of it was of visualizing intermediate calculations as if they were on a screen in my head. I’d close my eyes to minimize distracting external stimuli. I’d get pocket money because my dad would get his friends to bet on whether I could correctly multiply two 7-digit phone numbers, and when I won, which I always did, he’d give the money to me. He had an old-school electromechanical calculator he’d use to check the results.

            Neither of my parents and none of my many siblings had this ability.

            I was able to use a similar visualization technique to memorize long passages of music and text. That stayed with me post-puberty, though again at a lesser extent. I’ve also been able to learn languages more quickly than most.

            Once puberty kicked in, my ability to visualize declined significantly, though to compensate, I learned some mental arithmetics tricks that I still use now. I was able to get an MS in mathematics without much effort, since that relied on higher-level reasoning and not all that much on powerful memory or visualization. I didn’t pursue a Ph.D. due to lack of money but I think I could have gotten one (though I despise academic politics).

            So I think your comment about aphantasia is at least directionally correct, at least as applied to people. But there’s little reason to assume LLMs would do things the same way a human mind does, though both might operate under some similar information-theoretic constraints that would cause convergent evolution.

      • reev@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        45
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        21 hours ago

        I think what’s wild about it is that it really is surprisingly similar to how we actually think. It’s very different from how a computer (calculator) would calculate it.

        So it’s not a strange method for humans but that’s what makes it so fascinating, no?

        • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          5 hours ago

          I mean neural networks are modeled after biological neurons/brains after all. Kind of makes sense…

        • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 hours ago

          Yes, agreed. And calculators are essentially tabulators, and operate almost just like a skilled person using an abacus.

          We shouldn’t really be surprised because we designed these machines and programs based on our own human experiences and prior solutions to problems. It’s still neat though.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          24
          ·
          21 hours ago

          That’s what’s fascinating about how it does language in general.

          The article is interesting in both the ways in which things are similar and the ways they’re different. The rough approximation thing isn’t that weird, but obviously any human would have self-awareness of how they did it and not accidentally lie about the method, especially when both methods yield the same result. It’s a weirdly effective, if accidental example of human-like reasoning versus human-like intelligence.

          And, incidentally, of why AGI and/or ASI are probably much further away than the shills keep claiming.

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        22 hours ago

        This is pretty normal, in my opinion. Every time people complain about common core arithmetic there are dozens of us who come out of the woodwork to argue that the concepts being taught are important for deeper understanding of math, beyond just rote memorization of pencil and paper algorithms.

        • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 hours ago

          The problem with common core math isn’t that rounding is inherently bad, it’s that you don’t start with that as a framework.

          • futatorius@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            6 hours ago

            Memory can improve with training, and it’s useful in a large number of contexts. My major beef with rote memorization in schools is that it’s usually made to be excruciatingly boring. I’d say that’s the bigger problem.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        23 hours ago

        Nah I do similar stuff. I think very few people actually trace their own lines of thought, so they probably don’t realize this is how it often works.

        • forrgott@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          23 hours ago

          Huh. I visualize a whiteboard in my head. Then I…do the math.

          I’m also fairly certain I’m autistic, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        23 hours ago

        I do much the same in my head.

        Know what’s crazy? We sling bags of mulch, dirt and rocks onto customer vehicles every day. No one, neither coworkers nor customers, will do simple multiplication. Only the most advanced workers do it. No lie.

        Customer wants 30 bags of mulch. I look at the given space:

        “Let’s do 6 stacks of 5.”

        Everyone proceeds to sling shit around in random piles and count as we go. And then someone loses track and has to shift shit around to check the count.

        • futatorius@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          5 hours ago

          Yeah, one of my family members is a bricklayer and he can work out a bill of materials in his head based on the dimensions in an architectural plan: given these dimensions and this thickness of mortar joint, I’ll need this many bricks, this many bags of mortar, this many bags of sand, this many hours of labor, etc. It’s just addition and multiplication, but his colleagues regard him as a freak. And when he first started doing it, if you’d ask him to break down his reasoning, he’d find that difficult.

      • Mr. Satan@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        21 hours ago

        72 * 10 + 70 * 3 + 2 * 3

        That’s what I do in my head if I need an exact result. If I’m approximateing I’ll probably just do something like 70 * 15 which is much easier to compute (70 * 10 + 70 * 5 = 700 + 350 = 1050).

          • Mr. Satan@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            7 hours ago

            No it doesn’t, multiplication and division always take precedence over addition and subtraction. You’d need parentheses to clarify what is in the divisor since that can be ambiguous with line notation.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          21 hours ago

          OK, I’ve been willing to just let the examples roll even though most people are just describing how they’d do the calculation, not a process of gradual approximation, which was supposed to be the point of the way the LLM does it…

          …but this one got me.

          Seriously, you think 70x5 is easier to compute than 70x3? Not only is that a harder one to get to for me in the notoriously unfriendly 7 times table, but it’s also further away from the correct answer and past the intuitive upper limit of 1000.

          • Mr. Satan@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            7 hours ago

            Times 5 and times 10 tables are really easy for me. So yeah, in my mind it’s an easier comuptation.

            That being said having a result of a little over a 1000 gives me an estimate for the magnitude of a number – it’s around a thousand. It might be more or less but it’s not far from there.

          • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            20 hours ago

            See, for me, it’s not that 7*5 is easier to compute than 7*3, it’s that 5*7 is easier to compute than 7*3.

            I saw your other comment about 8’s, too, and I’ve always found those to be a pain, so I reverse them, if not outright convert them to arithmetic problems. 8x4 is some unknown value, but X*8 is always X*10-2X, although do have most of the multiplication tables memorized for lower values.
            8*7 is an unknown number that only the wisest sages can compute, however.

          • Broadfern@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            20 hours ago

            For me personally, anything times 5 can be reached by halving the number, then multiplying that number by 10.

            Example: 66 x 5 = Y

            • (66/2) x (5x2) = Y

              • cancel out the division by creating equal multiplication in the other number

              • 66/2 = 33

              • 5x2 = 10

            • 33 x 10 = Y

            • 33 x 10 = 330

            • Y = 330

          • toynbee@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            21 hours ago

            The 7 times table is unfriendly?

            I love 7 timeses. If numbers were sentient, I think I could be friends with 7.

            • MudMan@fedia.io
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              21 hours ago

              I’ve always hated it and eight. I can only remember the ones that are familiar at a glance from the reverse table and to this day I sometimes just sum up and down from those “anchor” references. They’re so weird and slippery.

              • toynbee@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                21 hours ago

                Huh.

                Going back to the “being friends” thing, I think you and I could be friends due to applying qualities to numbers; but I think it might be challenging because I find 7 and 8 to be two of the best. They’re quirky, but interesting.

                Thank you for the insight.

    • Kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 day ago

      Thanks for copypasting here. I wonder if the “prediction” is not as expected only in that case, when making rhymes. I also notice that its way of counting feels interestingly not too different from how I count when I need to come up fast with an approximate sum.

    • Neverclear@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      23 hours ago

      This reminds me of learning a shortcut in math class but also knowing that the lesson didn’t cover that particular method. So, I use the shortcut to get the answer on a multiple choice question, but I use method from the lesson when asked to show my work. (e.g. Pascal’s Pyramid vs Binomial Expansion).

      It might not seem like a shortcut for us, but something about this LLM’s training makes it easier to use heuristics. That’s actually a pretty big deal for a machine to choose fuzzy logic over algorithms when it knows that the teacher wants it to use the algorithm.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        10 hours ago

        You’re antropomorphising quite a bit there. It is not trying to be deceptive, it’s building two mostly unrelated pieces of text and deciding the fuzzy logic is getting it the most likely valid response once and that the description of the algorithm is the most likely response to the other. As far as I can tell there’s neither a reward for lying about the process nor any awareness of what the process was anywhere in this.

        Still interesting (but unsurprising) that it’s not getting there by doing actual maths, though.

  • hersh@literature.cafe
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    22 hours ago

    But here’s the really funky bit. If you ask Claude how it got the correct answer of 95, it will apparently tell you, “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” But that actually only reflects common answers in its training data as to how the sum might be completed, as opposed to what it actually did.

    This is not surprising. LLMs are not designed to have any introspection capabilities.

    Introspection could probably be tacked onto existing architectures in a few different ways, but as far as I know nobody’s done it yet. It will be interesting to see how that might change LLM behavior.

    • kshade@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 hours ago

      I’m surprised that they are surprised by this as well. What did they expect, and why? How much of this is written to imply LLMs - their business - are more advanced/capable than they actually are?

    • Singletona082@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      13 hours ago

      Then take that concept further, and let it keep introspecting and inspecting how it comes to the conclusions it does and eventually…

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      23 hours ago

      I think this comm is more suited for news articles talking about it, though I did post that link to !ai_@lemmy.world which I think would be a more suited comm for those who want to go more in-depth on it

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      arrow-down
      16
      ·
      1 day ago

      That bit about how it turns out they aren’t actually just predicting the next word is crazy and kinda blows the whole “It’s just a fancy text auto-complete” argument out of the water IMO

      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        43
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        23 hours ago

        It really doesn’t. You’re just describing the “fancy” part of “fancy autocomplete.” No one was ever really suggesting that they only predict the next word. If that was the case they would just be autocomplete, nothing fancy about it.

        What’s being conveyed by “fancy autocomplete” is that these models ultimately operate by combining the most statistically likely elements of their dataset, with some application of random noise. More noise creates more “creative” (meaning more random, less probable) outputs. They do not actually “think” as we understand thought. This can clearly be seen in the examples given in the article, especially to do with math. The model is throwing together elements that are statistically proximate to the prompt. It’s not actually applying a structured, logical method the way humans can be taught to.

        • FourWaveforms@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          20 hours ago

          Unfortunately, these articles are often written by people who don’t know enough to realize they’re missing important nuances.

          • datalowe@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            9 hours ago

            It also doesn’t help that the AI companies deliberately use language to make their models seem more human-like and cogent. Saying that the model e.g. “thinks” in “conceptual spaces” is misleading imo. It abuses our innate tendency to anthropomorphize, which I guess is very fitting for a company with that name.

            On this point I can highly recommend this open access and even language-wise accessible article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 (the authors also appear on an episode of the Better Offline podcast)

        • reev@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          21 hours ago

          Genuine question regarding the rhyme thing, it can be argued that “predicting backwards isn’t very different” but you can’t attribute generating the rhyme first to noise, right? So how does it “know” (for lack of a better word) to generate the rhyme first?

          • dustyData@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            15
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            21 hours ago

            It already knows which words are, statistically, more commonly rhymed with each other. From the massive list of training poems. This is what the massive data sets are for. One of the interesting things is that it’s not predicting backwards, exactly. It’s actually mathematically converging on the response text to the prompt, all the words at the same time.

              • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                10 hours ago

                We also check to see if the word that popped into our heads actually rhymes by saying it out loud. Actual validation steps we can take is a bigger difference than being a little more robust.

                We also have non-list based methods like breaking the word down into smaller chunks to try to build up hopefully more novel rhymes. I imagine professionals have even more tools, given the complexity of more modern rhyme schemes.

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        24 hours ago

        Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

        Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

        • Womble@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          23 hours ago

          Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

          Interesting that…

          Anthropic also found, among other things, that Claude “sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal ‘language of thought’.”

          • Carrolade@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            21 hours ago

            Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

            Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

            Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

            • Womble@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              20 hours ago

              I don’t think that’s really a fair comparison, babies exist with images and sounds for over a year before they begin to learn language, so it would make sense that they begin to understand the world in non-linguistic terms and then apply language to that. LLMs only exist in relation to language so couldnt understand a concept separately to language, it would be like asking a person to conceptualise radio waves prior to having heard about them.

              • Carrolade@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                20 hours ago

                Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

          • MTK@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            22 hours ago

            Yeah but I think this is still the same, just not a single language. It might think in some mix of languages (which you can actuaysee sometimes if you push certain LLMs to their limit and they start producing mixed language responses.)

            But it still has limitations because of the structure in language. This is actually a thing that humans have as well, the limiting of abstract thought through internal monologue thinking

            • Womble@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              20 hours ago

              Probably, given that LLMs only exist in the domain of language, still interesting that they seem to have a “conceptual” systems that is commonly shared between languages.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        13 hours ago

        I mean it implies that they CAN start with the conclusion or the “thought” and then generate the text to verbalize that.

        It’s shocking to what length humans will go to explain how their wetware neural network is fundamentally different and it’s impossible for LLMs to think or reason in any way. Honestly LLMs teach us more about human intelligence (or the lack thereof) than machine intelligence. Like obi wan said, “The ability to speak does not make one intelligent” haha.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        24 hours ago

        I read an article that it can “think” in small chunks. They don’t know how much though. This was also months ago, it’s probably expanded by now.

        • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          23 hours ago

          anything that claims it “thinks” in any way I immediately dismiss as an advertisement of some sort. these models are doing very interesting things, but it is in no way “thinking” as a sentient mind does.

          • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            10 hours ago

            Anybody who claims they don’t “think” before we even figure out completely how they work and even how human thoughts work are just spreading anti-AI sentiment beyond what is considered logical.

            You should become a better example than an AI by only arguing based on facts rather than things you hallucinate if you want to prove your own position on this matter.

          • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            13 hours ago

            You know they don’t think - even though “It’s a peculiar truth that we don’t understand how large language models (LLMs) actually work.”?

            It’s truly shocking to read this from a mess of connected neurons and synapses like yourself. You’re simply doing fancy word prediction of the next word /s

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            22 hours ago

            I wish I could find the article. It was researchers and they were freaked out just as much as anyone else. It’s like slightly over chance that it “thought,” not some huge revolutionary leap.

            • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              22 hours ago

              there has been a flooding of these articles. everyone wants to sell their llm as “the smartest one closest to a real human” even though the entire concept of calling them AI is a marketing misnomer

              • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                22 hours ago

                Maybe? Didn’t seem like a sales job at the time, more like a warning. You could be right though.

      • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        22 hours ago

        It doesn’t, who the hell cares if someone allowed it to break “predict whole text” into "predict part by part, and then “with rhyme, we start at the end”. Sounds like a naive (not as in “simplistic”, but as “most straightforward”) way to code this, so given the task to write an automatic poetry producer, I would start with something similar. The whole thing still stands as fancy auto-complete

          • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            5 hours ago

            Redditor as “a person active on Reddit”? I don’t see where I was talking about humans. Or am I misunderstanding the question?

  • Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    24 hours ago

    It’s amazing that humans have coded a tool for which they have to afterwards write more tools for analyzing how it works.

    • MTK@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      22 hours ago

      That has always been the case. Even basic programs need debugging sometimes, so we developed debuggers.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        12 hours ago

        Not really. When you program you break down the problem into many smaller sub programs and then codify them. There are errors that need debugging. But never “how does this part of the program I wrote work?”. Reading code from someone else is less fun than writing, but you can still understand it.

        There are some cases like detergents, apparently until recently we didn’t know exactly how it works. But human engineered tools are not comparable to this.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    24 hours ago

    The other day I asked an llm to create a partial number chart to help my son learn what numbers are next to each other. If I instructed it to do this using very detailed instructions it failed miserably every time. And sometimes when I even told it to correct specific things about its answer it still basically ignored me. The only way I could get it to do what I wanted consistently was to break the instructions down into small steps and tell it to show me its pr.ogress.

    I’d be very interested to learn it’s “thought process” in each of those scenarios.

  • vane@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    Someone put 69 to research and then to article. Nice trolling.