[HN Gopher] GPT-4o's Memory Breakthrough - Needle in a Needlestack
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GPT-4o's Memory Breakthrough - Needle in a Needlestack
        
       Author : parrt
       Score  : 453 points
       Date   : 2024-05-13 21:54 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nian.llmonpy.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nian.llmonpy.ai)
        
       | parrt wrote:
       | The article shows how much better GPT-4o is at paying attention
       | across its input window compared to GPT-4 Turbo and Claude-3
       | Sonnet.
       | 
       | We've needed an upgrade to needle in a haystack for a while and
       | this "Needle In A Needlestack" is a good next step! NIAN creates
       | a prompt that includes thousands of limericks and the prompt asks
       | a question about one limerick at a specific location.
        
         | mianos wrote:
         | I agree, I paid for Claude for a while. Even though they swear
         | the context is huge and having a huge context uses up tokens
         | like crack, it's near useless when source code in context just
         | a few pages back. It was so frustrating as everything else was
         | as good as anything and I liked the 'vibe'.
         | 
         | I used 4o last night and it was still perfectly aware of a C++
         | class I pasted 20 questions ago. I don't care about smart, I
         | care about useful and this really contributes to the utility.
        
       | dmose2 wrote:
       | It's interesting (though perhaps not surprising) to see the
       | variance in curve shape across models.
        
       | 19h wrote:
       | I'd like to see this for Gemini Pro 1.5 -- I threw the entirety
       | of Moby Dick at it last week, and at one point all books Byung
       | Chul-Han has ever published, and it both cases it was able to
       | return the single part of a sentence that mentioned or answered
       | my question verbatim, every single time, without any
       | hallucinations.
        
         | parrt wrote:
         | Wow. Cool. I have access to that model and have also seen some
         | impressive context extraction. It also gave a really good
         | summary of a large code base that I dumped in. I saw somebody
         | analyze a huge log file, but we really need something like this
         | needle in a needlestack to help identify when models might be
         | missing something. At the very least, this could give model
         | developers something to analyze their proposed models.
        
           | 19h wrote:
           | Funnily enough I ran a 980k token log dump against Gemini Pro
           | 1.5 yesterday to investigate an error scenario and it found a
           | single incident of a 429 error being returned by a third-
           | party API provider while reasoning that "based on the file
           | provided and the information that this log file is aggregated
           | of all instances of the service in question, it seems
           | unlikely that a rate limit would be triggered, and additional
           | investigation may be appropriate", and it turned out the
           | service had implemented a block against AWS IPs, breaking a
           | system that loads press data from said API provider, leaving
           | the customer who was affected by it without press data -- we
           | didn't even notice or investigate that, and Gemini just
           | randomly mentioned it without being prompted for that.
        
             | parrt wrote:
             | That definitely makes it seem like it's noticing a great
             | deal of its context window. impressive.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | If I had access to Gemini with a reasonable token rate limit, I
         | would be happy to test Gemini. I have had good results with it
         | in other situations.
        
           | cj wrote:
           | What version of Gemini is built into Google Workspace? (I
           | just got the ability _today_ to ask Gemini anything about
           | emails in my work Gmail account, which seems like something
           | that would require a large context window)
        
             | underlines wrote:
             | Such tasks don't need a large context window. Just good
             | RAG.
        
         | Fernicia wrote:
         | But this content is presumably in its training set, no? I'd be
         | interested if you did the same task for a collection of books
         | published more recently than the model's last release.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | I would _hope_ that Byung-Chul Han would not be in the
           | training set (at least not without his permission), given he
           | 's still alive and not only is the legal question still open
           | but it's also definitely rude.
           | 
           | This doesn't mean you're wrong, though.
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | It's pretty easy to confirm that copywritten material is in
             | the training data. See the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for
             | example.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Part of that back-and-forth is the claim "this specific
               | text was copied a lot all over the internet making it
               | show up more in the output", and _that_ means it 's _not_
               | a useful guide to things where one copy was added to The
               | Pile and not removed when training the model.
               | 
               | (Or worse, that Google already had a copy because of
               | Google Books and didn't think "might training on this
               | explode in our face like that thing with the Street View
               | WiFi scanning?")
        
           | 19h wrote:
           | To test this hypothesis, I just took the complete book
           | "Advances in Green and Sustainable Nanomaterials" [0] and
           | pasted it into the prompt, asking Gemini: "What absorbs
           | thermal radiations and converts it into electrical signals?".
           | 
           | It replied: "The text indicates that _graphene sheets_
           | present high optical transparency and are able to absorb
           | thermal radiations with high efficacy. They can then convert
           | these radiations into electrical signals efficiently. ".
           | 
           | Screenshot of the PDF with the relevant sentence highlighted:
           | https://i.imgur.com/G3FnYEn.png
           | 
           | [0] https://www.routledge.com/Advances-in-Green-and-
           | Sustainable-...
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | Ask it what material absorbs "infrared light" efficiently.
             | 
             | To me, that's useful intelligence. I can already search
             | text for verbatim matches, I want the AI to _understand_
             | that "thermal radiations" and "infrared light" are the same
             | thing.
        
               | tristor wrote:
               | Fair point, but I also think something that's /really/
               | clear is that LLMs don't understand (and probably
               | cannot). It's doing highly contextual text retrieval
               | based on natural language processing for the query, it's
               | not understanding what the paper means and producing
               | insights.
        
               | 19h wrote:
               | > Answer the following question using verbatim quotes
               | from the text above: "What material absorbs infrared
               | light efficiently?"
               | 
               | > "Graphene is a promising material that could change the
               | world, with unlimited potential for wide industrial
               | applications in various fields... It is the thinnest
               | known material with zero bandgaps and is incredibly
               | strong, almost 200 times stronger than steel. Moreover,
               | graphene is a good conductor of heat and electricity with
               | _very interesting light absorption properties_. "
               | 
               | Interestingly, the first sentence of the response
               | actually occures directly after the latter part of the
               | response in the original text.
               | 
               | Screenshot from the document:
               | https://i.imgur.com/5vsVm5g.png.
               | 
               | Edit: asking it _" What absorbs infrared light and
               | converts it into electrical signals?"_ yields _" Graphene
               | sheets are highly transparent presenting high optical
               | transparency, which absorbs thermal radiations with high
               | efficacy and converts it into electrical signals
               | efficiently."_ verbatim.
        
             | kaibee wrote:
             | Honestly I think testing these on fiction books would be
             | more impressive. The graphene thing I'm sure shows up in
             | some research papers.
        
           | a_wild_dandan wrote:
           | Gemini works with brand new books too; I've seen multiple
           | demonstrations of it. I'll try hunting one down. Side note:
           | this experiment is still insightful even using model training
           | material. Just compare its performance _with_ the uploaded
           | book(s) to _without._
        
         | DominikPeters wrote:
         | Just put the 2500 example linked on the article through Gemini
         | 1.5 _Flash_ and it answered correctly ( "The tree has diseased
         | leaves and its bark is peeling.") https://aistudio.google.com/
        
           | sftombu wrote:
           | Interesting!
        
         | nsagent wrote:
         | A number of people in my lab do research into long context
         | evaluation of LLMs for works of fiction. The likelihood is very
         | high that Moby Dick is in the training data. Instead the people
         | in my lab have explored recently published books to avoid these
         | issues.
         | 
         | See BooookScore (https://openreview.net/forum?id=7Ttk3RzDeu)
         | which was just presented at ICLR last week and FABLES
         | (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01261) a recent preprint.
        
           | robbiep wrote:
           | I'm not involved in the space, but it seems to me that having
           | a model, in particular a massive model, exposed to a corpus
           | of text like a book in the training data would have very
           | minimal impact. I'm aware that people have been able to
           | return data 'out of the shadows' pf the training data but to
           | my mind a model being mildly influenced by the weights
           | between different words in this text hardly constitute hard
           | recall, if anything it now 'knows' a little of the linguistic
           | style of the authour.
           | 
           | How far off am I?
        
             | int_19h wrote:
             | It depends on how many times it had seen that text during
             | training. For example, GPT-4 can reproduce ayats from the
             | Quran word for word in both Arabic and English. It can also
             | reproduce the Navy SEAL copypasta complete with all the
             | typos.
        
               | 19h wrote:
               | Brothers in username.. :-)
        
               | kaibee wrote:
               | Poe's "The Raven" also.
        
             | Salgat wrote:
             | Remember, it's also trained on countless internet
             | discussions and papers on the book.
        
           | westurner wrote:
           | HN post re: FABLES:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39982362
           | 
           | FABLES/booklist.md:
           | https://github.com/mungg/FABLES/blob/main/booklist.md
           | 
           | /gscholar_related? FABLES:
           | https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:Y-Hx-
           | kplbEUJ:sc...
           | 
           | /gscholar_citations? BoookScore: https://scholar.google.com/s
           | cholar?cites=1796862036168524911...
           | 
           | ...
           | 
           | From that one day awhile ago:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868#38354679 :
           | 
           | > _" LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them"
           | [ https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08516 ]
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353285 _
        
           | theptip wrote:
           | I suppose the question then is - if you finetune on your own
           | data (eg internal wiki) does it then retain the near-perfect
           | recall?
           | 
           | Could be a simpler setup than RAG for slow-changing
           | documentation, especially for read-heavy cases.
        
             | k__ wrote:
             | _" if you finetune on your own data (eg internal wiki) does
             | it then retain the near-perfect recall"_
             | 
             | No, that's one of the primary reasons for RAG.
        
               | theptip wrote:
               | I think you are misunderstanding. This post is about new
               | capabilities in GPT-4o. So the existing reasons for RAG
               | may not hold for the new model.
               | 
               | Unless you have some evals showing that the previous
               | results justifying RAG also apply to GPT-4o?
        
         | causality0 wrote:
         | Man, we are like 2-5 years away from being able to feed in an
         | ePub and get an accurate graphic novel version in minutes. I am
         | so ready to look at four thousand paintings of Tolkien trees.
        
       | nickca wrote:
       | Would love to see Gemini there too!
        
       | personjerry wrote:
       | That's great to hear. My biggest issue with GPT-4.0 was that as
       | the conversation got longer, the quality diminished (especially
       | relevant for coding projects)
       | 
       | I wonder if it'll be better now. Will test today.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | I had the same experience. With a 16k prompt, Turbo was nearly
         | flawless. But it wasn't very good at 32k and not usable at
         | 100+. You have to repeat information to get good results with
         | longer prompts
        
         | throwthrowuknow wrote:
         | That's been my experience so far. My current conversations are
         | crazy long compared to any of my gpt4 convos which I had to
         | frequently copy context from and start over in a new chat
        
       | youssefabdelm wrote:
       | Someone needs to come up with a "synthesis from haystack" test
       | that tests not just retrieval but depth of understanding,
       | connections, abstractions across diverse information.
       | 
       | When a person reads a book, they have an "overall intuition"
       | about it. We need some way to quantify this. Needle in haystack
       | tests feel like a simple test that doesn't go far enough.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | I was thinking about something similar -- to make part of the
         | question be sufficient information that the LLM can find the
         | limerick. Then the 2nd part would ask something that would
         | require a deeper understanding of the limerick (or other text).
        
         | adamgordonbell wrote:
         | I've been thinking about that as well.
         | 
         | It's hard, but if you have a piece of fiction or non-fiction it
         | hasn't seen before, then a deep reading comprehension question
         | can be a good indicator. But you need to be able to separate a
         | true answer from BS.
         | 
         | "What does this work says about our culture? Support your
         | answer with direct quotes."
         | 
         | I found both gpt-4 and haiku to do alright at this, but
         | sometimes give answers that imply fixating on certain sections
         | of a 20,000 k context. You could compare it against chunking
         | the text, getting the answer for each chunk and combining them.
         | 
         | I suspect if you do that then the chunking would win for things
         | that are found in many chunks, like the work is heavy handed on
         | a theme, but the large context would be better for a sublter
         | message, except sometimes it would miss it altogether and think
         | a Fight Club screenplay was a dark comedy.
         | 
         | Interpretation is hard I guess.
        
         | Eisenstein wrote:
         | My idea is to buy to a unpublished novel or screenplay with a
         | detailed, internally consistent world built in to it and a cast
         | of characters that have well crafted motivations and then ask
         | it to continue writing from an arbitrary post-mid-point by
         | creating a new plot line that combines two characters that
         | haven't yet met in the story. If it understands the context it
         | should be able to write a new part of the story and will be
         | able to use a reader's intuitive sense of the character's
         | motivations to move through their arc.
         | 
         | This whole thing would have to be kept under lock-and-key in
         | order to be useful, so it would only serve as a kind of
         | personal benchmark. Or it could possibly be a prestige award
         | that is valued for its conclusions and not for its ability to
         | use the methodology to create improvements in the field.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | You can only use it for a short while, they get a copy as
           | well.
        
             | Eisenstein wrote:
             | I have been thinking about this for use in evaluating
             | locally run models, so I didn't make that connection in
             | this case. I guess it would have limited utility.
        
           | semi-extrinsic wrote:
           | Just use memes. People generate new high-quality niche memes
           | so fast it's impossible for the LLMs to keep up.
        
         | jddj wrote:
         | An elaborate Agatha Christie style whodunit, with a series of
         | plot-twists and alibis which can be chopped off the end of the
         | piece to modify who is the most likely suspect
        
           | jddj wrote:
           | Or a spot the difference.
           | 
           | Generate 1000 generic facts about Alice and the same 1000
           | facts about Eve. Randomise the order and change one minor
           | detail then ask how they differ.
        
             | pushedx wrote:
             | sort alice.txt | diff - <(sort eve.txt)
             | 
             | That's not a task for an LLM
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | Asking students to write an essay about Napoleon isn't
               | something we do because we need essays about Napoleon -
               | the point is it's a _test_ of capabilities.
        
               | semi-extrinsic wrote:
               | I see you are being downvoted, but I agree with you.
               | 
               | A useful test would copy all Alice statements to Eve
               | statements, then rewrite all of the Eve statements using
               | synonyms, and then finally change one or two details for
               | Eve.
        
             | youssefabdelm wrote:
             | That seems to go back in the direction of needle in the
             | haystack again
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | The needles form a graph and the prompt asks graph based tasks.
        
           | sftombu wrote:
           | That is an interesting idea
        
         | segmondy wrote:
         | Why can't you be that someone?
        
           | gremlinsinc wrote:
           | lol, made me think of the euphemism: be the change you want
           | to see.
        
         | nebula8804 wrote:
         | I wonder if there is some way to have an AI help humans improve
         | their "reading comprehension" aka reasoning across a large body
         | of text. As far as I can tell the only way to do this is to cut
         | out mindless scrolling and force yourself to read a lot of
         | books in the hopes that this skill might be improved.
         | 
         | I am many years out of my grade school years where I was
         | required to read a multitude of novels every year and I guess
         | years of mindless reddit scrolling + focusing on nothing but
         | mathematics and the sciences in college have taken their toll:
         | I read long articles or books but completely miss the deeper
         | meaning.
         | 
         | As an example: my nerd like obsession with random topics of the
         | decade before I was born (until I get bored) caused me to read
         | numerous articles and all of Wikipedia + sources on the RBMK
         | reactors and Chernobyl nuclear accident as well as the stories
         | of the people involved.
         | 
         | But it wasn't until I sat down and watched that famous HBO mini
         | seres that I finally connected the dots of how the lies and
         | secretive nature of the soviet system led to the design flaws
         | in the reactor, and the subsequent suicide of Valery Legasov
         | helped finally expose them to the world where they could no
         | longer be hidden.
         | 
         | Its like I knew of all these events and people separately but
         | could not connect them together to form a deep realization and
         | when I saw it acted out on screen it all finally hit me like a
         | ton of bricks. How had I not seen it?
         | 
         | Hoping one day AI can just scan my existing brain structure and
         | recommend activities to change the neuronal makeup to what I
         | want it to be. Or even better since im a lazy developer, it
         | should just do it for me.
        
         | borgdefense wrote:
         | There is no understanding, it can't do this.
         | 
         | GPT4o still can't do the intersection of two different ideas
         | that are not in the training set. It can't even produce random
         | variations on the intersection of two different ideas.
         | 
         | Further though, we shouldn't expect the model to do this. It is
         | not fair to the model and its actual usefulness and how amazing
         | what the models can do with zero understanding. To believe the
         | model understands is to fool yourself.
        
       | petulla wrote:
       | You need to know that this test set data wasn't included in the
       | training data for this to be meaningful.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | If you ask the questions without providing the limerick first,
         | it never gets the right answer. When the LLM gets the wrong
         | answer, it is usually because it reverts to its training data
         | and gives a generic answer that doesn't apply to the limerick.
        
           | trifurcate wrote:
           | Why are you ruling out the possibility that training on the
           | material may confer an advantage when the data is presented,
           | even if the advantage may not be strong enough to pass the
           | test without the data present in the context window?
        
         | lmeyerov wrote:
         | I thought the test limericks were autogenerated?
        
           | sftombu wrote:
           | They come from a database of 98k limericks --
           | https://zenodo.org/records/5722527
        
         | a_wild_dandan wrote:
         | No you don't. Compare the model's performance before and after
         | uploading the material.
        
           | sftombu wrote:
           | Previous answer to this question:
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361419s
        
             | sumedh wrote:
             | No such item.
        
       | asadm wrote:
       | I have had good experience with Gemini 1M context model with this
       | kind of tasks.
        
       | rguptill wrote:
       | We also need a way to determine where a given response fits in
       | the universe of responses - is it an "average" answer or a really
       | good one
        
         | edmara wrote:
         | If you have an evaluation function which does this accurately
         | and generalizes, you pretty much already have have AGI.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | I thought google Gemini had almost perfect needle in haystack
       | performance inside 1 million tokens?
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | The reason I made Needle in a needlestack is the LLMs are
         | getting to good at needle in a haystack. Until GPT-4o, no model
         | was good at the NIAN benchmark.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | One could have LLM to route it to a text search function and have
       | the function report back to the LLM for secondary processing.
        
       | cararemixed wrote:
       | What's the chance that these limericks are now in the training
       | set? As others mention, it'd be interesting to come up with a way
       | to synthesize something sufficiently interesting so it always
       | evades training fit.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | Previous answer to this question:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361419
        
           | causal wrote:
           | Your test is a good one but the point still stands that a
           | novel dataset is the next step to being sure.
        
             | dontupvoteme wrote:
             | One could also programmatically (e.g. with nltk or spacy,
             | replace nouns, named entities, etc) modify the dataset,
             | even up to the point that every test run is unique.
             | 
             | You could also throw in vector similarity if you wanted to
             | keep words as more synonyms or antonyms.
        
       | thorum wrote:
       | The needle in the haystack test gives a very limited view of the
       | model's actual long context capabilities. It's mostly used
       | because early models were terrible at it and it's easy to test.
       | In fact, most recent models now do pretty good at this one task,
       | but in practice, their ability to do anything complex drops off
       | hugely after 32K tokens.
       | 
       | RULER is a much better test:
       | 
       | https://github.com/hsiehjackson/RULER
       | 
       | > Despite achieving nearly perfect performance on the vanilla
       | needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, all models (except for
       | Gemini-1.5-pro) exhibit large degradation on tasks in RULER as
       | sequence length increases.
       | 
       | > While all models claim context size of 32k tokens or greater
       | (except for Llama3), only half of them can effectively handle
       | sequence length of 32K by exceeding a qualitative threshold,
       | Llama2-7b performance at 4K (85.6%). The performance exceeding
       | the threshold is underlined.
        
         | WhitneyLand wrote:
         | Maybe, but
         | 
         | 1. The article is not about NIHS it's their own variation so it
         | could be more relevant.
         | 
         | 2. The whole claim of the article is that Gpt4o does better,
         | but the test your pointing to hasn't benchmarked it.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | The models benchmarked by RULER do worse in needle in a
         | needlestack. It will be interested to see how 4o does with
         | RULER.
        
       | throwthrowuknow wrote:
       | This is a very promising development. It would be wise for
       | everyone to go back and revise old experiments that failed now
       | that this capability is unlocked. It should also make RAG even
       | more powerful now that you can load a lot more information into
       | the context and have it be useful.
        
         | demilich wrote:
         | Agreed
        
       | throw7381 wrote:
       | Anyone has done any benchmarks for RAG yet?
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | How Do we know that gpt-4o.has not been trained on this dataset?
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | Previous answer to this question:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361419
        
       | irthomasthomas wrote:
       | This is based on a limericks dataset published in 2021.
       | https://zenodo.org/records/5722527
       | 
       | I think it very likely that gpt-4o was trained on this. I mean,
       | why would you not? Innnput, innnput, Johnny five need more
       | tokens.
       | 
       | I wonder why the NIAN team don't generate their limericks using
       | different models, and check to make sure they're not in the
       | dataset? Then you'd know the models couldn't possibly be trained
       | on them.
        
         | sftombu wrote:
         | I tested the LLMs to make sure they could not answer the
         | questions unless the limerick was given to them. Other than 4o,
         | they do very badly on this benchmark, so I don't think the test
         | is invalidated by their training.
        
           | cma wrote:
           | Why wouldn't it still be invalidated by it if it was indeed
           | trained on it? The others may do worse and may or may not
           | have been trained on it, but them failing on ititself doesn't
           | imply 4o can do this well without the task being present in
           | the corpus.
        
             | sftombu wrote:
             | It can't answer the questions without the limericks in the
             | prompt. The benchmark is to establish how well it uses the
             | context window. For example, I just asked it "What is
             | sought by the English top brass?". The answer from the
             | limerick is "Cranberry glass" and 4o answers correctly when
             | given the associated limerick once out of 2500+ limericks.
             | 
             | However, without the limerick, 4o responded with: "The term
             | "English top brass" typically refers to high-ranking
             | officials or leaders within the British government,
             | military, or other institutions. What they seek can vary
             | widely depending on the context and the specific goals of
             | their roles. Here are some general pursuits that might be
             | sought by such individuals:
             | 
             | National Security: Ensuring the safety and security of the
             | United Kingdom from internal and external threats is a
             | primary concern. This involves defense strategies,
             | intelligence operations, and counter-terrorism efforts.
             | 
             | Economic Stability: High-ranking officials often focus on
             | policies and initiatives aimed at maintaining and improving
             | the country's economic health. This includes managing
             | inflation, unemployment, trade relations, and economic
             | growth.
             | 
             | Political Influence: Top brass often seek to maintain or
             | expand their influence both domestically and
             | internationally. This can involve diplomacy, forming
             | alliances, and participating in international organizations
             | like the United Nations or NATO.
             | 
             | Social Cohesion: Ensuring social stability and addressing
             | issues such as inequality, healthcare, education, and
             | social services are critical. This can involve implementing
             | policies that promote social welfare and cohesion.
             | 
             | Public Policy Implementation: Leaders are responsible for
             | developing and implementing policies that reflect the
             | government's priorities. This includes legislation,
             | regulatory frameworks, and public administration.
             | 
             | Technological Advancement: Keeping the nation at the
             | forefront of technological innovation is often a priority.
             | This includes investments in research and development,
             | supporting tech industries, and ensuring cybersecurity.
             | 
             | Environmental Sustainability: Addressing climate change and
             | promoting sustainable practices are increasingly important.
             | This includes policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions,
             | protecting natural resources, and transitioning to
             | renewable energy sources.
             | 
             | Cultural and Heritage Preservation: Protecting and
             | promoting the country's cultural heritage and national
             | identity can also be a focus. This includes supporting the
             | arts, preserving historical sites, and promoting cultural
             | initiatives.
             | 
             | These pursuits are shaped by the current political climate,
             | global trends, and the specific priorities of the leaders
             | in question. Would you like more detailed information on
             | any of these areas?"
        
               | Aeolun wrote:
               | Maybe if you tell it to pull the answer from a limerick
               | instead of generally asking?
               | 
               | Edit: Ok no, I tried giving it a whole bunch of hints,
               | and it was just making stuff up that was completely
               | unrelated. Even directly pointing it at the original
               | dataset didn't help.
        
               | EGreg wrote:
               | Come on guys, it's already far beyond superhuman if it's
               | able to do that and so quickly. So if it's not able to do
               | that, what's the big deal? If you're asking for AG.I.,
               | then it seems that the model performs beyond it in these
               | areas.
        
               | causal wrote:
               | Yeah I also tried to get it to complete some limericks
               | from the dataset. Curiously it believed it had heard of
               | the limerick but would then recite a hallucination.
               | 
               | So the good news is that the NIAN score might be real,
               | bad news is you can't rely on it to know what it knows.
        
               | seanhunter wrote:
               | If you ask it to complete a limerick and it finishes it
               | differently from the original, but it still works as a
               | limerick is that really a hallucination?
        
               | furyofantares wrote:
               | This sounds dumb - but what if you give it all the
               | limericks MINUS the one you want it to answer about?
               | 
               | I think it will fail, but this actually seems like the
               | cleanest way to demonstrate it.
        
               | cma wrote:
               | Still not enough to rule out training on the data in the
               | task affecting the task. It may be that it couldn't find
               | it without it appearing in the training data, but even
               | with that it also needs it in its context window to
               | bridge enough connections from the training or whatever
               | to do well on the task.
        
               | cma wrote:
               | > It can't answer the questions without the limericks in
               | the prompt.
               | 
               | Maybe I can't solve a bunch of mostly memorized math
               | problems without a visual mnemonic aid. Someone seeing me
               | fail the problems without the visual aid doesn't rule out
               | me having partly memorized solutions.
        
             | djsjajah wrote:
             | A better test would be to see if it can still answer the
             | question if you just exclude the limerick for that answer.
             | Having a bunch of limericks in the context window will make
             | it "think" about all of the limericks it "knows".
        
           | dontupvoteme wrote:
           | It would be interesting to know how it acts if you ask it
           | about one that _isn 't_ present, or even lie to it (e.g. take
           | a limerick that is present but change some words and ask it
           | to complete it)
           | 
           | Maybe some models hallucinate or even ignore your mistake vs
           | others correcting it (depending on the context ignoring or
           | calling out the error might be the more 'correct' approach)
           | 
           | Using limericks is a very nifty idea!
        
         | internet101010 wrote:
         | No disassemble!
        
         | dontupvoteme wrote:
         | NIAN is a very cool idea, but why not simply translate it into
         | N different languages (you even can mix services, e.g.
         | deepl/google translate/LLMs themselves) and ask about them that
         | way?
        
         | neverokay wrote:
         | Why not just generate complete random stuff and ask it to find
         | stuff in that?
        
           | Kostchei wrote:
           | We have run that test.- generate random string(not by llm)
           | names of values- ask the llm to do math (algebra) using those
           | strings. Tests logic, 100% not in the data set GPT2 was like
           | 50% accurate, now we up around the 90%.
        
       | ionwake wrote:
       | I am in England, do US users have access to memory features? (
       | Also do you ahve access to voice customisation yet?
       | 
       | Thanks
        
         | rob137 wrote:
         | I am in England, on the 'Team Plan'* and got access to memory
         | this week.
         | 
         | * https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-team/
        
           | ionwake wrote:
           | Thank you!
        
         | sumedh wrote:
         | memory features are available in Australia.
        
       | whimsicalism wrote:
       | Increasingly convinced that nobody on the public internet knows
       | how to do actual LLM evaluations.
        
         | tedeh wrote:
         | I'm just glad that we are finally past the "Who was the 29th
         | president of the United States" and "Draw something in the
         | style of Van Gogh" LLM evaluation test everyone did in
         | 2022-2023.
        
       | yatz wrote:
       | Well, I can now use GPT to transform raw dynamic data into
       | beautiful HTML layouts on the fly for low-traffic pages, such as
       | change/audit logs, saving a ton of development time and keeping
       | my HTML updated even when the data structure has changed. My last
       | attempt did not consistently work because GPT4-Turbo sometimes
       | ignored the context and instructions almost entirely.
        
         | ijidak wrote:
         | Do you have an example of this? I would love to learn more.
        
           | balder1991 wrote:
           | I guess you just need to offer a template in the prompt? Then
           | maybe some validation after.
        
             | yatz wrote:
             | No templates, just some rules and the model does the rest.
             | It worked like a charm, even gave me ideas on how to layout
             | and format the page to make it easy to read.
        
           | yatz wrote:
           | Here is the entire prompt. I used rules to ensure the
           | formatting is consistent as otherwise sometimes it might
           | format date one way and other times in an entirely different
           | way.
           | 
           | Imagine, a truly dynamic and super personal site, where
           | layout, navigation, styling and everything else gets
           | generated on the fly using user's usage behavior and other
           | preferences, etc. Man!
           | ---------------------------------------------
           | 
           | {JSON} ------ You are an auditing assistant. Your job is to
           | convert the ENTIRE JSON containing "Order Change History"
           | into a human-readable Markdown format. Make sure to follow
           | the rules given below by letter and spirit. PLEASE CONVERT
           | THE ENTIRE JSON, regardless of how long it is.
           | --------------------------------------------- RULES: -
           | Provide markdown for the entire JSON. - Present changes in a
           | table, grouped by date and time and the user, i.e.,
           | 2023/12/11 12:40 pm - User Name. - Hide seconds from the date
           | and time and format using the 12-hour clock. - Do not use any
           | currency symbols. - Format numbers using 1000 separator. - Do
           | not provide any explanation, either before or after the
           | content. - Do not show any currency amount if it is zero. -
           | Do not show IDs. - Order by date and time, from newest to
           | oldest. - Separate each change with a horizontal line.
        
       | causality0 wrote:
       | I don't understand OpenAI's pricing strategy. For free I can talk
       | to GPT 3.5 on an unlimited basis, and a little to GPT 4o. If I
       | pay $20 a month, I can talk to GPT 4o eighty times every three
       | hours, or once every two and a half minutes. That's both way more
       | than I need, and way less than I would expect for twenty dollars
       | a month. I wish they had a $5 per month tier that included, say,
       | eighty messages per 24-hours.
        
         | hackerlight wrote:
         | It'll make more sense when they deploy audio and image
         | capability to paying users only, which they say they're going
         | to do in a few weeks
        
           | causality0 wrote:
           | Yeah, but I want a tier where I have access to it in a pinch,
           | but won't feel guilty for spending the money and then going a
           | whole month without using it.
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | Guilty? Over $20 a _month_? I spend more than that in an
             | hour down the pub.
        
               | causality0 wrote:
               | You get something for your money at the pub. If you pay
               | twenty dollars for a service and then don't use it you
               | have wasted your money.
        
               | olddustytrail wrote:
               | Well, yes, I get more liver damage. I wouldn't worry too
               | much about $20. Give an equal amount extra to charity or
               | bet on something.
               | 
               | There was a time that amount mattered to me but if you're
               | working any kind of dev/ops job it just doesn't any more.
        
       | croes wrote:
       | >Needle in a Needlestack is a new benchmark to measure how well
       | LLMs pay attention to the information in their context window
       | 
       | I asked GPT-4o for JavaScript code and got Python, so much for
       | attention.
        
         | kolinko wrote:
         | What was your query?
        
       | 8thcross wrote:
       | These benchmarks are becoming like the top 10 lists you find on
       | the internet. I agree that everything has a space, but frankly
       | how many of us need a test that tells you that this is great at
       | limericks?
        
       | bearjaws wrote:
       | I just used it to compare two smaller legal documents and it
       | completely hallucinated that items were present in one and not
       | the other. It did this on three discrete sections of the
       | agreements.
       | 
       | Using ctrl-f I was able to see that they were identical in one
       | another.
       | 
       | Obviously this is a single sample but saying 90% seems unlikely.
       | They were around ~80k tokens total.
        
         | bckr wrote:
         | Yeah I asked for an estimate of the percentage of the US
         | population that lives in the DMV area (DC, Maryland, Virginia)
         | and it was off by 50% of the actual answer, which I only
         | realized when I realized I shouldn't trust its estimate for
         | anything important
        
           | KeplerBoy wrote:
           | Those models still can't reliably do arithmetic, so how could
           | it possibly know that number unless it's a commonly repeated
           | fact?
           | 
           | Also: would you expect random people to fare any better?
        
             | chrischen wrote:
             | Arithmetic just happens to be something we can easily and
             | reliably verify, so it becomes painfully obvious when LLMs
             | are just stringing together some words that sound like the
             | right answer.
        
             | bckr wrote:
             | It used web search (RAG over the entire web) and analysis
             | (math tool) and still came up with the wrong answer.
             | 
             | It has done more complex things for me than this and,
             | sometimes, gotten it right.
             | 
             | Yes, it's supposed to be able to do this.
        
         | kylebenzle wrote:
         | What you are asking an llm to do here makes no sense.
        
           | potatoman22 wrote:
           | Why not? It seems like a natural language understanding task
        
           | marshray wrote:
           | You haven't seen the promotion of the use of LM AI for
           | handling legal documents?
           | 
           | It's purported to be a major use case.
        
           | cmrdporcupine wrote:
           | You might be right but I've lost count of the number of
           | startups I've heard of trying to do this for legal documents.
        
         | davedx wrote:
         | > Obviously this is a single sample but saying 90% seems
         | unlikely.
         | 
         | This is such an anti-intellectual comment to make, can't you
         | see that?
         | 
         | You mention "sample" so you understand what statistics is, then
         | in the same sentence claim 90% seems unlikely with a sample
         | size of 1.
         | 
         | The article has done substantial research
        
           | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
           | That fact that it has some statistically significant
           | performance is irrelevant and difficult to evaluate for most
           | people.
           | 
           | He's a much simpler and correct description that almost
           | everyone can understand: _it fucks up constantly._
           | 
           | Getting something wrong even once can make it useless for
           | most people. No amount of pedantry will change this reality.
        
             | davedx wrote:
             | What on earth? The experimental research demonstrates that
             | it doesn't "fuck up constantly", you're just making things
             | up. The various performance metrics people around the world
             | to measure and compare model performance is not irrelevant
             | because you, some random internet commenter, claim so
             | without any evidence.
             | 
             | This isn't pedantry, it's science.
        
           | lopuhin wrote:
           | And also article is testing on a different task (Needle in a
           | Needlestack which is kind of similar to Needle in a
           | Haystack), compared to finding a difference between two
           | documents. For sure it's useful to know that the model does
           | ok in one and really bad in the other, does not mean that
           | original test is flawed.
        
         | carlosbaraza wrote:
         | I have the same feeling. I asked to find duplicates in a list
         | of 6k items and it basically hallucinated the entire answer
         | multiple times. Some times it finds some, but it interlaces the
         | duplicates with other hallucinated items. I wasn't expecting it
         | to get it right, cause I think this task is challenging with a
         | fixed amount of attention heads. However, the answer seems much
         | worse than Claude Opus or GPT-4.
        
           | akomtu wrote:
           | Everyone is trying to use Language Models as Reasoning Models
           | because the latter haven't been invented yet.
        
         | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
         | That's a different test than needle-in-a needlestack, although
         | telling in how brittle these models are - competent in one
         | area, and crushingly bad in others.
         | 
         | Needle-in-a-needlestack contrasts with needle-in-a-haystack by
         | being about finding a piece of data among similar ones (e.g.
         | one specific limeric among thousands of others), rather than
         | among disimilar ones.
        
         | 1970-01-01 wrote:
         | I've done the same experiment with local laws and caught GPT
         | hallucinating fines and fees! The problem is real.
        
           | tmaly wrote:
           | Imagine if they started using LLMs to suggest prison
           | sentences
        
         | fnordpiglet wrote:
         | That's not needle in a haystack.
         | 
         | I would note that LLMs handle this task better if you slice the
         | two documents into smaller sections and iterate section by
         | section. They aren't able to reason and have no memory so can't
         | structurally analyze two blobs of text beyond relatively small
         | pieces. But incrementally walking through in much smaller
         | pieces that are themselves semantically contained and related
         | works very well.
         | 
         | The assumption that they are magic machines is a flawed one.
         | They have limits and capabilities and like any tool you need to
         | understand what works and doesn't work and it helps to
         | understand why. I'm not sure why the bar for what is still a
         | generally new advance for 99.9% of developers is effectively
         | infinitely high while every other technology before LLMs seemed
         | to have a pretty reasonable "ok let's figure out how to use
         | this properly." Maybe because they talk to us in a way that
         | appears like it could have capabilities it doesn't? Maybe it's
         | close enough sounding to a human that we fault it for not being
         | one? The hype is both overstated and understated simultaneously
         | but there have been similar hype cycles in my life (even things
         | like XML were going to end world hunger at one point).
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | I think large language models can be used to classify people,
       | lying, or saying, rehearsed, things or being disingenuous. Simply
       | train them on a lot of audio of people talking, and they would
       | become better than most polygraph machines. There's something
       | about how a person says something that quickly reveals that it
       | was rehearsed earlier, or premeditated, and I'm sure when they're
       | lying there can be things like that too. the LLM can instantly
       | pick up with some probability and classify it
       | 
       | I've seen claims during open AI demo that is there software can
       | now pick up on extremely subtle emotional clues, how people
       | speak. Then, it shouldn't take much more to make it read between
       | the lines and understand what people are intending to say, for
       | example, by enumerating all possible interpretations and scoring
       | them based on, many factors, including the current time,
       | location, etc. In fact, by taking into account so much context in
       | factors, the LLM's will be better than people the vast majority
       | of the time understanding what a person meant, assuming they were
       | genuinely trying to communicate something.
       | 
       | it will become very hard to lie because everyone's personal LLM
       | will pick up on it fairly quickly, and find tons of
       | inconsistencies, which it will flag for you later. You will no
       | longer be fooled so easily, and if it has the context of
       | everything the person has said publicly, plus if the person gives
       | permission for your LLM to scan everything they've said privately
       | because you're their Business partner or sexual partner, it can
       | easily catch you in many lies and so on.
       | 
       | I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, human society will
       | completely change as people start to prefer machines to other
       | people, because they understand them so well, and taken into
       | account, the context of everything they've ever said. They will
       | be thoughtful, remembering details about the person in many
       | different dimensions, and use them to personalize everything. By
       | contrast, the most thoughtful husband or boyfriend will seem
       | like, a jerk seems now. Or a cat.
       | 
       | Humor and seductive conversation, will also be at a superhuman
       | standards. People will obviously up their game too, just like
       | when they do when playing the game go after Lee Sedol was totally
       | destroyed by Alpha go, or when people start using Alpha Zarro to
       | train for Chess. However, once the computers understand what
       | triggers people to laugh or have sexual response, they will be
       | able to trigger them a lot more predictively, they simply need
       | more training data.
       | 
       | And bullshitting will be done on a completely different level.
       | Just like people no longer walk to destinations but use cars to
       | go thousands of miles a year, similarly people won't interact
       | with other people so much anymore. The LLM's, trained to bullshit
       | 1000 times better than any human, Will be undetectable and
       | gradually shift public opinion as open source models will power
       | swarms of accounts.
        
       | sschueller wrote:
       | We are all so majorly f*d.
       | 
       | The general public does not know nor understand this limitation.
       | At the same time OpenAI is selling this a a tutor for your kids.
       | Next it will be used to test those same kids.
       | 
       | Who is going to prevent this from being used to pick military
       | targets (EU law has an exemption for military of course) or make
       | surgery decisions?
        
         | Arn_Thor wrote:
         | If any regulator acts it will be the EU. The action, if it
         | comes, will of course be very late, possibly years from now,
         | when the horse has long left the stable.
        
           | sschueller wrote:
           | My only hope for the EU government is that they put and AI in
           | charge and it accidentally becomes sentient...
        
         | rolandog wrote:
         | > or make surgery decisions?                 Analyzing surgical
         | field...       Identified: open chest cavity, exposed internal
         | organs       Organs appear gooey, gelatinous, translucent pink
         | Comparing to database of aquatic lifeforms...       93% visual
         | match found:       Psychrolutes marcidus, common name
         | "blobfish"       Conclusion: Blobfish discovered inhabiting
         | patient's thoracic cavity       Recommended action: Attempt to
         | safely extract blobfish without damaging organs
        
         | hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
         | Right now insurance companies make those decisions based on how
         | your life affects the profit/loss statement at the end of the
         | quarter. (In the USA).
         | 
         | So it can't really be worse if there's just a RNG in a box. It
         | may be better.
        
         | histories wrote:
         | > OpenAI is selling this a a tutor for your kids.
         | 
         | The Diamond Age.
        
           | ipsin wrote:
           | That's what I find most offensive about the use of LLMs in
           | education: it can readily produce something in the _shape_ of
           | a logical argument, without actually being correct.
           | 
           | I'm worried that a generation might learn that that's good
           | enough.
        
             | Kostchei wrote:
             | a generation of consultants is already doing that- look at
             | the ruckus around PWC etc in Australia. Hell, look at the
             | folks supposedly doing diligence on Enron. This is not new.
             | People lie, fib and prevaricate. The fact the machines
             | trained on our actions do the same thing should not come as
             | a shock. If anything it strikes me as the uncanny valley of
             | truthiness.
        
         | GuardianCaveman wrote:
         | I was in a counter-intelligence unit briefly and there was a
         | mathemtician who spoke to us about the work they were doing to
         | pick targets with the idea that if you can only out one person,
         | who would be the most disruptive. You have all these
         | interconnected but mostly isolated terrorist cells that don't
         | know about each other except through a few people who may not
         | be high up in the command but who are critical for the
         | continuing cohesive existence of that terrorist group of cells
         | and logistics etc.
         | 
         | So the military already was using math to pick targets, this is
         | just the next logical step, albeit, scary as hell step.
        
           | jspank wrote:
           | In your scenario there were still individuals accountable for
           | the decisions and their outcomes.
           | 
           | How are you supposed to say why a machine learning model
           | produces different outputs from the same input? It's just a
           | black box.
        
         | kromokromo wrote:
         | This is just doomerism. Even though this model is slightly
         | better than the previous, using an LLM for high risk tasks like
         | healthcare and picking targets in military operations still
         | feels very far away. I work in healthcare tech in a European
         | country and yes we use AI for image recognition on x-rays,
         | retinas etc but these are fundamentally completely different
         | models than a LLM.
         | 
         | Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the
         | future, someone might use some other variation of AI for this
         | but LLMs are not very effective on this.
        
           | ExoticPearTree wrote:
           | I use ChatGPT in particular to narrow down options when I do
           | research, and it is very good at this. It wouldn't be far-
           | fetched to feed it a map, traffic patterns and ask it to do
           | some analysis of "what is the most likeliest place to hit"?
           | And then take it from there.
        
           | dbspin wrote:
           | AI is already being used for picking targets in warzones -
           | https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-
           | ta....
           | 
           | LLM's will of course also be used, due to their convenience
           | and superficial 'intelligence', and because of the layer of
           | deniability creating a technical substrate between soldier
           | and civilian victim provides - as has happened for two
           | decades with drones.
        
             | mike_hearn wrote:
             | Note that the IDF explicitly denied that story:
             | 
             | https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-
             | art...
             | 
             | Probably this is due to confusion over what the term "AI"
             | means. If you do some queries on a database, and call
             | yourself a "data scientist", and other people who call
             | themselves data scientists do some AI, does that mean
             | you're doing AI? For left wing journalists who want to
             | undermine the Israelis (the story originally appeared in
             | the Guardian) it'd be easy to hear what you want to hear
             | from your sources and conflate using data with using AI.
             | This is the kind of blurring that happens all the time with
             | apparently technical terms once they leave the tech world
             | and especially once they enter journalism.
        
               | antihero wrote:
               | The IDF explicitly deny a lot of things, which turn out
               | to be true.
        
               | adamtaylor_13 wrote:
               | Just like... (checks notes)... oh yeah every government
               | on the planet.
        
               | mike_hearn wrote:
               | Yeah, but the Guardian explicitly state a lot of things
               | which turn out to be not true also.
               | 
               | Given that the underlying premise of the story is bizarre
               | (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't
               | select their own targets), and given that the sort of
               | people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel, it
               | makes more sense that the story is being misreported.
        
               | runarberg wrote:
               | More likely, the IDF is committing a genocide and are
               | finding innovative ways to create a large list of targets
               | which grants them plausible deniability.
        
               | racional wrote:
               | _The underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the
               | IDF really so short of manpower that they can 't select
               | their own targets)_
               | 
               | The premise that the IDF would use some form of automated
               | information processing to help select potential targets,
               | in the year 2023?
               | 
               | There's nothing at all unrealistic about this premise, of
               | course. If anything it's rather bizarre to suggest that
               | it might be.
               | 
               |  _The sort of people who work at the Guardian openly
               | loathe Israel_
               | 
               | This sounds you just don't have much to say about the
               | substantive claims of these reports (which began with
               | research by two Israeli publications, +972 and the Local
               | Call -- and then taken further by The Guardian). Or would
               | you say that former two "openly loathe Israel" also?
               | Along with the Israeli sources that they're quoting?
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | The "independent examinations" is doing a heavy lift
               | there.
               | 
               | At most charitable, that means a person is reviewing all
               | data points before approval.
               | 
               | At least charitable, that means a person is clicking
               | approved after glancing at the values generated by the
               | system.
               | 
               | The press release doesn't help clarify that one way or
               | the other.
               | 
               | If you want to read thoughts by the guy who was in charge
               | of building and operating the automated intelligence
               | system, he wrote a book: https://www.amazon.com/Human-
               | Machine-Team-Artificial-Intelli...
        
               | ignoramous wrote:
               | > _Probably this is due to confusion over what the term
               | "AI" means._
               | 
               | AI is how it is marketed to the buyers. Either way, the
               | system isn't a database or simple statistics.
               | https://www.accessnow.org/publication/artificial-
               | genocidal-i...
               | 
               | Ex, autonomous weapons like "smart shooter" employed in
               | Hebron and Bethlehem:
               | https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/06/palestinian-forum-
               | highli...
        
               | nopromisessir wrote:
               | If Israel did not take a sophisticated approach to their
               | defense, they would have long been overrun by their
               | neighbors and likely slaughtered to the point of
               | extinction.
               | 
               | These sources are rife with bias. The first article
               | literally says 'artificial genocidal intelligence'. The
               | second emmediatly references the international crime of
               | apartheid.
               | 
               | Genocide was the Arab world's openly stated objective for
               | the Jews in 1948.
               | 
               | The international crime of apartheid was created by the
               | United Nations. To those who understand the middle east,
               | this statement is as equal an endictment of credibility
               | as the former regarding genocide.
               | 
               | The nuance matters. The history matters. I'd recommend
               | watching PBS's lengthy series 'Israel and the Arabs.'
               | it's entertaining and enlightening. Then spend another
               | few hours on the topic and travel to the middle east to
               | see it yourself. After that, articles such as the ones
               | you posted really read quite differently than most might
               | expect.
        
               | ignoramous wrote:
               | > _a sophisticated approach to their defense_
               | 
               | A euphemism for apartheid and oppression?
               | 
               | > _sources are rife with bias_
               | 
               | What's biased about terming autonomous weapons as "AI"?
               | Or, sounding alarm over dystopian surveillance enabled by
               | AI?
               | 
               | > _The nuance matters._
               | 
               | Like Ben Gurion terming Lehi "freedom fighters" as
               | terrorists? And American Jewish intellectuals back then
               | calling them fascists?
               | 
               | > _The history matters... After that, articles such as
               | the ones you posted really read quite differently than
               | most might expect._
               | 
               | https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/i-changed-my-mind-on-
               | zioni...
        
               | SiempreViernes wrote:
               | The nuance of Ben-Gvir presumably ...
        
               | nopromisessir wrote:
               | I will spend no more than two comments on this issue.
               | 
               | Most people have already made up their minds. There is
               | little I can do about that, but perhaps someone else
               | might see this and think twice.
               | 
               | Personally, I have spent many thousands of hours on this
               | topic. I have Palestinian relatives and have visited the
               | Middle East. I have Arab friends there, both Christian
               | and Muslim, whom I would gladly protect with my life. I
               | am neither Jewish nor Israeli.
               | 
               | There are countless reasons for me to support your side
               | of this issue. However, I have not done so for a simple
               | reason: I strive to remain fiercely objective.
               | 
               | As a final note, in my youth, I held views similar to the
               | ones you propagate. This was for a simple reason--I had
               | not taken the time to understand the complexities of the
               | Middle East. Even now, I cannot claim to fully comprehend
               | them. However, over time, one realizes that while every
               | story has two sides, the context is crucial. The
               | contextual depth required to grasp the regrettable
               | necessity of Israeli actions in their neighborhood can
               | take years or even decades of study to reconcile. I
               | expect to change few minds on this topic. Ultimately, it
               | is up to the voters to decide. There is overwhelming
               | bipartisan support for Israel in one of the world's most
               | divided congresses, and this support stems more from
               | shared values than from arms sales.
               | 
               | I stand by my original comment. As I said, this will be
               | my last on this topic. I hope this exchange proves useful
               | to some.
        
               | ignoramous wrote:
               | > _I strive to remain fiercely objective._
               | 
               | Commendable. You'll appreciate this Israeli historian:
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj_HKw-UlUk (summary:
               | https://archive.is/dOP7g). And this Israeli Prof, also an
               | expert on Holocaust studies, being fiercely objective:
               | https://www.mekomit.co.il/ps/134005/ (en:
               | https://archive.is/Fjj6f)
               | 
               | > _I had not taken the time to understand the
               | complexities of the Middle East. Even now, I cannot claim
               | to fully comprehend them._
               | 
               | Why even spend 2 comments?
               | 
               | > _The contextual depth required to grasp the regrettable
               | necessity of Israeli actions..._
               | 
               | The same level of depth as Supremacists who regrettably
               | exterminated non-Aryans?
               | 
               | > _There is overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel in
               | one of the world 's most divided congresses, and this
               | support stems more from shared values._
               | 
               | This is undeniable, but the underlying "shared values"
               | here are not the ones you'd like us to think:
               | https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/instruments-of-
               | dehuman...
               | 
               | > _I stand by my original comment._
               | 
               | Like you say, there's the entire might of the US
               | political and elite class behind you; it isn't some act
               | of courage or rebellion, fwiw.
               | 
               | > _As a final note, in my youth, I held views similar to
               | the ones you propagate._
               | 
               | Propagate? Your final note sounds like a threat.
        
               | racional wrote:
               | _Genocide was the Arab world 's openly stated objective
               | for the Jews in 1948._
               | 
               | How would you substantiate this claim?
        
             | throwthrowuknow wrote:
             | Why? There are many other types of AI or statistical
             | methods that are easier, faster and cheaper to use not to
             | mention better suited and far more accurate. Militaries
             | have been employing statisticians since WWII to pick
             | targets (and for all kinds of other things) this is just
             | current-thing x2 so it's being used to whip people into a
             | frenzy.
        
               | mrbungie wrote:
               | Because you can charge up a lot more when adding hot and
               | hyped features like LLMs instead of doing good
               | engineering.
        
               | throwthrowuknow wrote:
               | I don't know for sure but I imagine getting blackballed
               | by the defence department is not fun.
        
               | tsunamifury wrote:
               | It can do limited battlefield reasoning where a remote
               | pilot has significant latency.
               | 
               | Call these LLMs stupid all you want but on focused tasks
               | they can reason decently enough. And better than any past
               | tech.
        
               | throwthrowuknow wrote:
               | That seems like something a special purpose model would
               | be a lot better and faster at. Why use something that
               | needs text as input and output? It would be slow and
               | unreliable. If you need reaction time dependent decisions
               | like collision avoidance or evasion for example then you
               | can literally hard wire those in circuits that are faster
               | than any other option.
        
           | lhoff wrote:
           | >Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In
           | the future
           | 
           | I guess the future is now then:
           | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-
           | how...
           | 
           | Excerpt:
           | 
           | >Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until
           | January, has said the target division is "powered by AI
           | capabilities" and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers.
           | 
           | >In an interview published before the war, he said it was "a
           | machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively
           | than any human, and translates it into targets for attack".
           | 
           | >According to Kochavi, "once this machine was activated" in
           | Israel's 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100
           | targets a day. "To put that into perspective, in the past we
           | would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine
           | produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being
           | attacked."
        
             | agos wrote:
             | nothing in this says they used an LLM
        
               | throwthrowuknow wrote:
               | I guess he must have hallucinated that it was about LLMs
        
               | SiempreViernes wrote:
               | But it _does_ say that some sort of text processing AI
               | system is being used _right now_ to decide who to kill,
               | it is therefore quite hard to argue that LLMs
               | specifically could never be used for it.
               | 
               | It is rather implausible to say that an LLM will never be
               | used for this application, because in the current hype
               | environment the only reason the LLM is not deployed to
               | production is that someone actually tried to use it
               | first.
        
           | wolfd wrote:
           | It's absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely
           | something that some companies are trying to sell regardless
           | of the many known failure modes.
           | 
           | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-
           | us...
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU
        
           | coldtea wrote:
           | > _Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd_
           | 
           | You'd be surprised.
           | 
           | Not to mention it's also used for military and intelligence
           | "analysis".
           | 
           | > _using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and
           | picking targets in military operations still feels very far
           | away_
           | 
           | When immaturity and unfitness for purpose has ever stopped
           | companies selling crap?
        
           | exe34 wrote:
           | > picking targets in military operations
           | 
           | I'm 100% on the side of Israel having the right to defend
           | itself, but as I understand it, they are already using "AI"
           | to pick targets, and they adjust the threshold each day to
           | meet quotas. I have no doubt that some day they'll run
           | somebody's messages through chat gpt or similar and get the
           | order: kill/do not kill.
        
             | mlnj wrote:
             | 'Quotas each day to find targets to kill'.
             | 
             | That's a brilliant and sustainable strategy. /s
        
           | goopthink wrote:
           | I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we've
           | evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto
           | their feature set as an "AI" improvement. Some of the newer
           | startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy
           | UI. We've passed on most of these but not all. And these
           | companies have clients, real world case studies. It's not
           | just not very far away, it is actively here.
        
           | currymj wrote:
           | i don't know about European healthcare but in the US, there
           | is this huge mess of unstructured text EMR and a lot of hope
           | that LLMs can help 1) make it easier for doctors to enter
           | data, 2) make some sense out of the giant blobs of noisy
           | text.
           | 
           | people are trying to sell this right now. maybe it won't work
           | and will just create more problems, errors, and work for
           | medical professionals, but when did that ever stop hospital
           | administrators from buying some shiny new technology without
           | asking anyone.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | OpenAI is. Their TOS says don't use it for that kind of shit.
         | 
         | https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies/
        
           | tsimionescu wrote:
           | That's the license for the public service. Nothing prevents
           | them from selling it as a separate package deal to an army.
        
         | ComplexSystems wrote:
         | Why would the military use ChatGPT or depend on any way on
         | Openai 's policy? Wouldn't they just roll their own?
        
         | antihero wrote:
         | It is being used to pick military targets, with very little
         | oversight.
         | 
         | https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
        
         | nvarsj wrote:
         | I've had coworkers suggest a technical solution that was
         | straight up fabricated by an LLM and made no sense. More
         | competent people realise this limitation of the models and can
         | use them wisely. Unfortunately I expect to see the former
         | spread.
        
           | meindnoch wrote:
           | I've spent a few hours last week crafting a piece of code for
           | my coworker, and then when I asked him to test it in the real
           | environment, it turned out that the API he wanted to connect
           | to the code I gave him was just a hallucination by ChatGPT.
        
         | booleandilemma wrote:
         | People aren't dumb. They'll catch on pretty quick that this
         | thing is BS'ing them.
        
         | ethbr1 wrote:
         | I get a good chuckle every morning when the "C3.ai" ad rolls on
         | NPR.
         | 
         | "Hallucination-free," indeed.
         | 
         | Would love to know what actual, contractual guarantees they
         | place around that.
        
         | farmdve wrote:
         | Next it's going to teach them the Earth is flat and there are
         | aliens behind the moon.
        
         | CWuestefeld wrote:
         | I hear these complaints and can't see how this is worse than
         | the pre-AI situation. How is an AI "hallucination" different
         | from human-generated works that are just plain wrong, or
         | otherwise misleading?
         | 
         | Humans make mistakes all the time. Teachers certainly did back
         | when I was in school. There's no fundamental qualitative
         | difference here. And I don't even see any evidence that there's
         | any difference in degree, either.
        
           | unclebucknasty wrote:
           | > _There 's no fundamental qualitative difference
           | here...degree either._
           | 
           | I've heard the same comparisons made with self-driving cars
           | (i.e. that humans are fallible, and maybe even more error-
           | prone).
           | 
           | But this misses the point. People trust the fallibility they
           | know. That is, we largely understand human failure modes
           | (errors in judgement, lapses in attention, etc) and feel like
           | we are in control of them (and we are).
           | 
           | OTOH, when machines make mistakes, they are experienced as
           | unpredictable and outside of our control. Additionally, our
           | _expectation_ of machines is that they are deterministic and
           | not subject to mistakes. While we know bugs can exist, it 's
           | not the _expectation_. And, with the current generation of AI
           | in particular, we are dealing with models that are generally
           | probabilistic, which means there 's not even the
           | _expectation_ that they are errorless.
           | 
           | And, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect people to give
           | up control to AI of this quality, particularly in matters of
           | safety or life and death; really anything that matters.
           | 
           | TLDR; Most people don't want to gamble their lives on a
           | statistic, when the alternative is maintaining control.
        
             | chaorace wrote:
             | Expanding on this, human failures and machine failures are
             | qualitatively different in ways that make our systems
             | generally less resilient against the machine variety, even
             | when dealing with a theoretically near-perfect
             | implementation. Consider a bug in an otherwise perfect
             | self-driving car routine that causes crashes under a highly
             | specific scenario -- roads are essentially static
             | structures, so you've effectively concentrated 100% of
             | crashes into (for example) 1% of corridors. Practically
             | speaking, those corridors would be forced into a state of
             | perpetual closure.
             | 
             | This is all to say that randomly distributed failures are
             | more tolerable than a relatively smaller number of
             | concentrated failures. Human errors are rather nice by
             | comparison because they're inconsistent in locality while
             | still being otherwise predictable in macroscopic terms
             | (e.g.: on any given day, there will always be far more
             | rear-endings than head-on collisions). When it comes to
             | machine networks, all it takes is one firmware update for
             | both the type & locality of their failure modes to go into
             | a wildly different direction.
        
             | tifik wrote:
             | What you say is true, and I agree, but that is the
             | emotional human side of thinking. Purely logically, it
             | would nake sense to compare the two systems of control and
             | use the one with fewer human casualities. Not saying its
             | gonna happen, just thinking that reason and logic should
             | take precedent, no matter what side you are on.
        
               | unclebucknasty wrote:
               | It definitely _seems_ like a matter of simple math. But,
               | I 'm not 100% sure it's always the most logical choice to
               | defer to statistics.
               | 
               | By definition, stats operate at the macro level. So, for
               | instance, I may be a safer driver than the AI average.
               | Should _I_ give up control? I suppose it 's also a matter
               | of degree and there's the network effect to consider
               | (i.e. even If I individually beat the average, I'm still
               | on the road with others who don't).
               | 
               | So it gets a little more complicated and I'm also not
               | sure the aversion to relinquishing control is strictly
               | "emotional" (as in the irrational sense). There's
               | something about the potential finality of a failure that
               | goes along with autonomy and agency over one's own life.
               | The idea that a machine could make a mistake that ends
               | your life, and you never had a chance or say in that
               | outcome is off-putting in ways that feel more rooted in
               | rationality and survival than in emotion.
        
           | DeathArrow wrote:
           | >I hear these complaints and can't see how this is worse than
           | the pre-AI situation. How is an AI "hallucination" different
           | from human-generated works that are just plain wrong, or
           | otherwise misleading?
           | 
           | With humans there is a chance you get things right.
        
           | UncleMeat wrote:
           | "Sorry, computer says no."
           | 
           | Humans can be wrong, but they aren't able to be wrong at as
           | massive of a scale and they often have an override button
           | where you can get them to look at something again.
           | 
           | When you have an AI deployed system and full automation
           | you've got more opportunities for "I dunno, the AI says that
           | you are unqualified for this job and there is no way around
           | that."
           | 
           | We already see this with less novel forms of automation.
           | There are great benefits here, but also the number of times
           | people are just stymied completely by "computer says no" has
           | exploded. Expect that to increase further.
        
           | skywhopper wrote:
           | Because people know they make mistakes, and aren't always
           | 100% certain and are capable of referring you to other
           | people. Also because the mistakes LLMs make are entirely
           | unlike mistakes humans make. Humans don't generate fake URLs
           | citing entirely fake references. Humans don't apologize when
           | corrected and then re-assert the same mistake. Also because
           | we know that people aren't perfect and we don't expect them
           | to be infallible, humans can break out of their script and
           | work around the process that's been encoded in their
           | computers.
           | 
           | But most people _do_ expect computers to be infallible, and
           | the marketing hype for LLMs is that they are going to replace
           | all human intellectual labor. Huge numbers of people actually
           | believe that. And if you could convince an LLM it was wrong
           | (you can't, not reliably), it has no way around the system
           | it's baked into.
           | 
           | All of these things are really really dangerous, and just
           | blithely dismissing it as "humans make mistakes, too, lol" is
           | really naive. Humans can decide not to drop a bomb or shoot a
           | gun if they see that their target isn't what they expect. AIs
           | never will.
        
           | lnxg33k1 wrote:
           | Probably the main difference is that humans fail at smaller
           | scale, with smaller effects, and build a reputation, probably
           | chatgpt hallucinations can potentially affect everyone
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | Humans _know_ when they 've made a mistake. So there's ways
           | to deal with that.
           | 
           | Computers are final. You don't want things to be final when
           | your life's on the line.
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | > Humans know when they've made a mistake.
             | 
             | You'll never make senior management with that attitude. At
             | worst, "mistakes were made" and look a bit sad.
        
           | Sophira wrote:
           | Society has spent literal decades being convinced to put
           | their trust in everything computers do. We're now at the
           | point that, in general, that trust is there and isn't
           | misplaced.
           | 
           | However, now that computers can plausibly do certain tasks
           | that they couldn't before via LLMs, society has to learn that
           | this is an area of computing that _can 't_ be trusted. That
           | might be easy for more advanced users who already don't trust
           | what corporations are doing with technology[0], but for most
           | people this is going to be a tall order.
           | 
           | [0] https://i.imgur.com/6wbgy2L.jpeg
        
           | bananapub wrote:
           | > How is an AI "hallucination" different from human-generated
           | works that are just plain wrong, or otherwise misleading?
           | 
           | yikes, mate, you've really misunderstood what's happening.
           | 
           | when a human fucks up, a human has fucked up. you can appeal
           | to them, or to their boss, or to their CEO.
           | 
           | the way these crappy "AI" systems are being deployed, there
           | is no one to appeal to and no process for unfucking things.
           | 
           | yes, this is not exactly caused by AI, it's caused by
           | sociopaths operating businesses and governments, but the
           | extent to which this enabled them and their terrible disdain
           | for the world is horrifying.
           | 
           | this is already happening, of course - Cathy O'Neil wrote
           | "Weapons Of Math Destruction" in 2016, about how unreviewable
           | software systems were screwing people, from denying poor
           | people loans to harsher sentencing for minority groups, but
           | Sam Altman and the new generation of AI grifters now want
           | this to apply to _everything_.
        
         | Dumblydorr wrote:
         | Surgeons don't need a text based LLM to make decisions. They
         | have a job to do and a dozen years of training into how to do
         | it. They have 8 years of schooling and 4-6 years internship and
         | residency. The tech fantasy that everyone is using these for
         | everything is a bubble thought. I agree with another comment,
         | this is Doomerism.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | Surgeons are using robots that are far beyond fly by wire
           | though, to the point that you could argue they're instructing
           | the robots rather than controlling them.
        
         | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
         | Israel is already doing exactly that... using AI to identify
         | potential targets based on their network of connections, giving
         | these potential targets a cursory human screening, then OK-ing
         | the bombing of their entire family since they have put such
         | faith (and/or just don't care) in this identification process
         | that these are considered high-value targets where "collateral
         | damage" is accepted.
        
         | bobosha wrote:
         | https://pessimistsarchive.org/
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | >Who is going to prevent this from being used to pick military
         | targets
         | 
         | When AI is in charge of controlling weapons, you get this:
         | https://www.accessnow.org/publication/artificial-genocidal-i...
        
         | chazeon wrote:
         | It seems US and China are trying to reach an agreement to use
         | AI to pick military targets these days.
        
         | gdubs wrote:
         | While this is clearly a problem and a challenge to address, the
         | thing that never gets mentioned with this line of criticism is
         | the obvious: a large number of real-life teachers make mistakes
         | ALL the time. They harbor wrong / out-dated opinions, or
         | they're just flat-out wrong about things.
        
       | tartrate wrote:
       | Are there any prompts/tests about recalling multiple needles
       | (spread out) at once?
       | 
       | For example, each needle could be a piece to a logic puzzle.
        
       | feverzsj wrote:
       | LLMs are still toys, no one should treat them seriously.
       | Apparently, the bubble is too massive now.
        
         | cdelsolar wrote:
         | Must be a pretty cool toy; it constantly 10X's my productivity.
        
           | nopromisessir wrote:
           | You said it mate. I feel bad for folks who turn away from
           | this technology. If they persist... They will be so confused
           | why they get repeatedly lapped.
           | 
           | I wrote a working machine vision project in 2 days with these
           | toys. Key word: working... Not hallucinated. Actually
           | working. Very useful.
        
             | SubiculumCode wrote:
             | My daughter berated me for using AI (the sentiment among
             | youth is pretty negative, and it is easy to understand
             | why), but I simply responded, "if I don't my peers still
             | will, then we'll be living on the street." And it's true,
             | I've 10x'd my real productivity as a scientist (for
             | example, using llms to help me code one off scripts for
             | data munging, automating our new preprocessing pipelines,
             | etc, quickly generating bullet points for slides).
             | 
             | The trick though is learning how to prompt, and developing
             | the sense that the LLM is stuck with the current prompt and
             | needs another perspective. Funnily enough, the least amount
             | of luck I've had is getting the LLM to write precisely
             | enough for science (yay I still have a job), even without
             | the confabulation, the nuance is lacking...that it's almost
             | always faster for me to write it myself.
        
             | SiempreViernes wrote:
             | Without details that's a meaningless stat, I remember some
             | pytorch machine vision tutorials promising they'll only
             | take like an hour, including training and also gives a
             | working project at the end.
        
             | davedx wrote:
             | I just don't understand why AI is so polarising on a
             | technology website.
             | 
             | OpenAI have even added a feature to make the completions
             | from GPT near-deterministic (by specifying a seed). It
             | seems that no matter what AI companies do, there will be a
             | vocal minority shouting that it's worthless.
        
           | davedx wrote:
           | It's staggering to me that people on _Hacker News_ are
           | actually _downvoting_ people saying how AI is boosting
           | productivity or levering business or engineering or finance.
           | The denial, cynicism and sheer wilful ignorance is actually
           | depressing. I get that not everyone is working directly with
           | AI /ML but I honestly expected better on a website about
           | _technology_.
           | 
           | People are deliberately self selecting themselves out of the
           | next industrial revolution. It's Darwin Awards for SWE
           | careers. It's making me ranty.
        
         | infecto wrote:
         | We have businesses getting real value from these toys. Maybe
         | you have not been in the right circles to experience this?
        
           | feverzsj wrote:
           | Of course you can get value from toy business, but toys are
           | toys.
        
         | nopromisessir wrote:
         | Used toys to write a working machine vision project over last 2
         | days.
         | 
         | Key word: working
         | 
         | The bubble is real on both sides. Models have limitations...
         | However, they are not toys. They are powerful tools. I used 3
         | different SotA models for that project. The time saved is hard
         | to even measure. It's big.
        
           | SiempreViernes wrote:
           | > The time saved is hard to even measure. It's big.
           | 
           | You are aware that this is an obvious contradiction, right?
           | Big times savings are not hard to measure.
        
             | nopromisessir wrote:
             | Right... With precision...
             | 
             | Furthermore... big mountains are easier to weigh v small
             | individual atoms? I think it's a little more complicated
             | than big is easy to measure...
             | 
             | I care little about the precision... I've got other
             | priorities. It's the same as the time the internet saves
             | me... Big. It's obvious.
             | 
             | I stand by my statement. It's hard to measure...
        
       | ammar_x wrote:
       | The article compares GPT-4o to Sonnet from Anthropic. I'm
       | wondering how Opus would perform at this test?
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | I wonder how llama3 is doing.
        
       | whereismyacc wrote:
       | I always thought it seemed likely that most needle in a haystack
       | tests might run into the issue of the model just encoding some
       | idea of 'out of place-ness' or 'significance' and querying on
       | that, rather than actually saying something meaningful about
       | generalized retrieval capabilities. Does that seem right? Is that
       | the motivation for this test?
        
       | pojzon wrote:
       | Meh still for a lot of stuff it simply lies.
       | 
       | Just today it lied to me about VRL language syntax, tryin to sell
       | me some python stuff in there.
       | 
       | Senior ppl will often be able call out the bullshit, but I
       | believe for junior ppl it will be very detrimental.
       | 
       | Nether the less amazing tool for d2d work if you can call out BS
       | replies.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-05-15 23:02 UTC)