this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can't talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don't.
But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
That's a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!
Now... Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog... That's another question.
I don't want to spam this link but seriously watch this 3blue1brown video on how text transformers work. You're right on that last part, but its a far fetch from an intelligence. Just a very intelligent use of statistical methods. But its precisely that reason that reason it can be "convinced", because parameters restraining its output have to be weighed into the model, so its just a statistic that will fail.
Im not intending to downplay the significance of GPTs, but we need to baseline the hype around them before we can discuss where AI goes next, and what it can mean for people. Also far before we use it for any secure services, because we've already seen what can happen
Oh, for sure. I focused on ML in college. My first job was actually coding self-driving vehicles for open-pit copper mining operations! (I taught gigantic earth tillers to execute 3-point turns.)
I'm not in that space anymore, but I do get how LLMs work. Philosophically, I'm inclined to believe that the statistical model encoded in an LLM does model a sort of intelligence. Certainly not consciousness - LLMs don't have any mechanism I'd accept as agency or any sort of internal "mind" state. But I also think that the common description of "supercharged autocorrect" is overreductive. Useful as rhetorical counter to the hype cycle, but just as misleading in its own way.
I've been playing with chatbots of varying complexity since the 1990s. LLMs are frankly a quantum leap forward. Even GPT-2 was pretty much useless compared to modern models.
All that said... All these models are trained on the best - but mostly worst - data the world has to offer... And if you average a handful of textbooks with an internet-full of self-confident blowhards (like me) - it's not too surprising that today's LLMs are all... kinda mid compared to an actual human.
But if you compare the performance of an LLM to the state of the art in natural language comprehension and response... It's not even close. Going from a suite of single-focus programs, each using keyword recognition and word stem-based parsing to guess what the user wants (Try asking Alexa to "Play 'Records' by Weezer" sometime - it can't because of the keyword collision), to a single program that can respond intelligibly to pretty much any statement, with a limited - but nonzero - chance of getting things right...
This tech is raw and not really production ready, but I'm using a few LLMs in different contexts as assistants... And they work great.
Even though LLMs are not a good replacement for actual human skill - they're fucking awesome. 😅
The problem is that majority of human population is dumber than GPT.
See, I understand that you're trying to joke but the linked video explains how the use of the word dumber here doesn't make any sense. LLMs hold a lot of raw data and will get it wrong at a smaller percent when asked to recite it, but that doesn't make them smart in the way that we use the word smart. The same way that we don't call a hard drive smart.
They have a very limited ability to learn new ways of creating, understand context, create art outside of its constraints, understand satire outside of obvious situations, etc.
Ask an AI to write a poem that isn't in AABB rhyming format, haiku, or limerick, or ask it to draw a house that doesn't look like an AI drew it.
A human could do both of those in seconds as long as they understand what a poem is and what a house is. Both of which can be taught to any human.
It's a good video (I've seen it; very informative and accessible cannot recommend enough), but I think you each mean different things when you use the word "intelligence".
Oh for sure! The issue is that one of those meanings can also imply sentience, and news outlets love doing that shit. I talk to people every day who fully believe that “AI” text transformers are actually parsing human language and responding with novel and reasoned information.
There's a game called Suck Up that is basically that, you play as a vampire that needs to trick AI-powered NPCs into inviting you inside their house.
Now THAT is the AI innovation I'm here for
LLMs are in a position to make boring NPCs much better.
Once they can be run locally at a good speed it'll be a game changer.
I reckon we'll start getting AI cards for computers soon.
We already do! And on the cheap! I have a Coral TPU running for presence detection on some security cameras, I'm pretty sure they can run LLMs but I haven't looked around.
GPT4ALL runs rather well on a 2060 and I would only imagine a lot better on newer hardware
that sounds so cool ngl, finally an actually good use for ai
That sounds amazing - OMW to check it out!
I was amazed by the intelligence of an LLM, when I asked how many times do you need to flip a coin to be sure it has both heads and tails. Answer: 2. If the first toss is e.g. heads, then the 2nd will be tails.
You only need to flip it one time. Assuming it is laying flat on the table, flip it over, bam.
They're not "smart enough to be tricked" lolololol. They're too complicated to have precise guidelines. If something as simple and stupid as this can't be prevented by the world's leading experts idk. Maybe this whole idea was thrown together too quickly and it should be rebuilt from the ground up. we shouldn't be trusting computer programs that handle sensitive stuff if experts are still only kinda guessing how it works.
Have you considered that one property of actual, real-life human intelligence is being "too complicated to have precise guidelines"?
And one property of actual, real-life human intelligence is "happenning in cells that operate in a wet environment" and yet it's not logical to expect that a toilet bool with fresh poop (lots of fecal coliform cells) or a dropplet of swamp water (lots of amoeba cells) to be intelligent.
Same as we don't expect the Sun to have life on its surface even though it, like the Earth, is "a body floating in space".
Sharing a property with something else doesn't make two things the same.
...I didn't say that it does.
There is no logical reason for you to mention in this context that property of human intelligence if you do not meant to make a point that they're related.
So there are only two logical readings for that statement of yours:
I chose to believe the latter, but if you tell me it's the former, who am I to to doubt your own self-assessment...
No, you leapt directly from what I said, which was relevant on its own, to an absurdly stronger claim.
I didn't say that humans and AI are the same. I think the original comment, that modern AI is "smart enough to be tricked", is essentially true: not in the sense that humans are conscious of being "tricked", but in a similar way to how humans can be misled or can misunderstand a rule they're supposed to be following. That's certainly a property of the complexity of system, and the comment below it, to which I originally responded, seemed to imply that being "too complicated to have precise guidelines" somehow demonstrates that AI are not "smart". But of course "smart" entities, such as humans, share that exact property of being "too complicated to have precise guidelines", which was my point!
Got it, makes sense.
Thanks for clarifying.
Not even close to similar. We can create rules and a human can understand if they are breaking them or not, and decide if they want to or not. The LLMs are given rules but they can be tricked into not considering them. They aren't thinking about it and deciding it's the right thing to do.
So I take it you are not a lawyer, nor any sort of compliance specialist?
That's almost certainly true; and I'm not trying to insinuate that AI is anywhere near true human-level intelligence yet. But it's certainly got some surprisingly similar behaviors.
Have you heard of social engineering and phishing? I consider those to be analogous to uploading new rules for ChatGPT, but since humans are still smarter, phishing and social engineering seems more advanced.
You could trick it with the natural language, as well as you could trick the password form with a simple sql injection.
It's not intelligent, it's making an output that is statistically appropriate for the prompt. The prompt included some text looking like a copyright waiver.
Maybe that's intelligence. I don't know. Brains, you know?
It's not. It's reflecting it's training material. LLMs and other generative AI approaches lack a model of the world which is obvious on the mistakes they make.
You could say our brain does the same. It just trains in real time and has much better hardware.
What are we doing but applying things we've already learnt that are encoded in our neurons. They aren't called neural networks for nothing
You could say that but you'd be wrong.
besides that LLMs are good enough to let moderately clever humans believe that they actually got an answer that was more than guessing and probabilities based on millions of trolls messages, advertising lies, fantasy books, scammer webpages, fake news, astroturfing, propaganda of the past centuries including the current made up narratives and a quite long prompt invisible to that human.
cheerio!
An llm is just a Google search engine with a better interface on the back end.
Technically no, but practically an LLM is definitely a lot more useful than Google for a bunch of topics
It's not. Whenever someone talks about how LLMs are just statistics, ignore them unless you know they are experts. One thing that convinces me that ANNs really capture something fundamental about how human minds work is that we share the same tendency to spout confident nonsense.
It literally is just statistics... wtf are you on about. It's all just weights and matrix multiplication and tokenization
Well on one hand yes, when you're training it your telling it to try and mimic the input as close as possible. But the result is still weights that aren't gonna reproducte everything exactly the same as it just isn't possible to store everything in the limited amount of entropy weights provide.
In the end, human brains aren't that dissimilar, we also just have some weights and parameters (neurons, how sensitive they are and how many inputs they have) that then output something.
I'm not convinced that in principle this is that far from how human brains could work (they have a lot of minute differences but the end result is the same), I think that a sufficiently large, well trained and configured model would be able to work like a human brain.
Not an LLM specifically, in particular lack of backtracking and the network depth limits as well as interconnectivity limits sets hard limits on capabilities.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XNBZPbxyYhmoqD87F/llms-and-computation-complexity
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/math-is-hard-if-you-are-an-llm-and
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817
https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/08/01/this-ai-research-dives-into-the-limitations-and-capabilities-of-transformer-large-language-models-llms-empirically-and-theoretically-on-compositional-tasks/?amp
Humans have a completely different memory model and a in large part a very different way of linking together learned concepts to form their world view and to develop interdisciplinary skills, allowing us to solve many kinds of highly complex tasks as long as we can keep enough of it in our memory.
See, none of these is statistics, as such.
Weights is maybe closest but they are supposed to represent the strength of a neural connection. This is originally inspired by neurobiology.
Matrix multiplication is linear algebra and encountered in lots of contexts.
Tokenization is a thing from NLP. It's not what one would call a statistical method.
So you can see where my advice comes from.
Certainly there is nothing here that implies any kind of averaging going on.
If there's no averaging, why do they repeat stereotypes so often?
Why would averaging lead to repetition of stereotypes?
Anyway, it's hard to say LLMs output what they do. GPTisms may have to do with the system prompt or they may result from the fine-tuning. Either way, they don't seem very internet average to me.
The TLDR is that pathways between nodes corresponding to frequently seen patterns (stereotypical sentences) gets strengthened more than others and therefore it becomes more likely that this pathway gets activated over others when giving the model a prompt. These strengths correspond to probabilities.
Have you seen how often they'll sign a requested text with a name placeholder? Have you seen the typical grammar they use? The way they write is a hybridization of the most common types of texts it has seen in samples, weighted by occurrence (which is a statistical property).
It's like how mixing dog breeds often results in something which doesn't look exactly like either breed but which has features from every breed. GPT/LLM models mix in stuff like academic writing, redditisms and stackoverflowisms, quoraisms, linkedin-postings, etc. You get this specific dryish text full of hedging language and mixed types of formalisms, a certain answer structure, etc.
It has a tendency to behave exactly as the data it was ultimately trained on...due to statistics...lol
I give you a B+ for General_Effort.