Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought
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Sounds scary. I read a story the other day about a dude who really got himself a discord server with chatbots, and that was his main place of "communicating" and "socializing"
This anecdote has the makings of a "men will literally x instead of going to therapy" joke.
On a more serious note though, I really wish people would stop anthropomorphisizing these things, especially when they do it while dehumanizing and devaluing humanity as a whole.
But that's unlikely to happen. It's the same type of people that thought the mind was a machine in the first industrial revolution, and then a CPU in the third...now they think it's an LLM.
LLMs could have some better (if narrower) applications if we could stop being so stupid as to inject them into things where they are obviously counterproductive.
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But then you wouldn't need to click on thir Ad infested shite website where 1-2 paragraphs worth of actual information is stretched into a giant essay so that they can show you more Ads the longer you scroll
I will never understand how ppl survive without ad blockers. Tried it once recently and it was a horrific experience.
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They do it because it works on the whole. If straight titles were as effective they'd be used instead.
That's mildly depressing.
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The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.
A lot of ai research isn't published in journals but either posted to a corporate website or put up on the arxiv. There are some ai journals, but the ai community doesn't particularly value those journals (and threw a bit of a fit when they came out). This article is mostly marketing and doesn't show anything that should surprise anyone familiar with how neural networks work generically in my opinion.
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I will never understand how ppl survive without ad blockers. Tried it once recently and it was a horrific experience.
I'm thankful for such people's sacrifice, if it wasn't for them there would be even more anti ad block measures in place
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It also doesn't help that the AI companies deliberately use language to make their models seem more human-like and cogent. Saying that the model e.g. "thinks" in "conceptual spaces" is misleading imo. It abuses our innate tendency to anthropomorphize, which I guess is very fitting for a company with that name.
On this point I can highly recommend this open access and even language-wise accessible article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 (the authors also appear on an episode of the Better Offline podcast)
I can't contemplate whether LLMs think until someone tells me what it means to think. It's too easy to rely on understanding the meaning of that word only through its typical use with other words.
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Fascist. If someone does maths differently than your preference, it's not "weird shit". I'm facile with mental math despite what's perhaps a non-standard approach, and it's quite functional to be able to perform simple to moderate levels of mathematics mentally without relying on a calculator.
Fascist
Wat
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Pen and paper maths I'm pretty decent at, but ask me to calculate anything in my head and it's anyone's guess if I remembered to carry the 1 or not. Ever since learning about aphantasia I'm wondering if the lack of being able to visually store values has something to do with it.
I can visually store values and I still struggle.
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"The planning thing in poems blew me away," says Batson. "Instead of at the very last minute trying to make the rhyme make sense, it knows where it’s going."
How is this surprising, like, at all? LLMs predict only a single token at a time for their output, but to get the best results, of course it makes absolute sense to internally think ahead, come up with the full sentence you're gonna say, and then just output the next token necessary to continue that sentence. It's going to re-do that process for every single token which wastes a lot of energy, but for the quality of the results this is the best approach you can take, and that's something I felt was kinda obvious these models must be doing on one level or another.
I'd be interested to see if there are massive potentials for efficiency improvements by making the model able to access and reuse the "thinking" they have already done for previous tokens
I wanted to say exactly this. If you’ve ever written rap/freestyled then this is how it’s generally done.
You write a line to start with
“I’m an AI and I think differentially”
Then you choose a few words that fit the first line as best as you could: (here the last word was “differentially”)
- incrementally
- typically
- mentally
Then you try them out and see what clever shit you could come up with:
- “Apparently I do my math atypically”
- ”Number are great, I know, but not totally”
- “I have to think through it all, incrementally”
- ”I find the answer like you do: eventually”
- “Just like you humans do it, organically”
- etc
Then you sort them in a way that makes sense and come up with word play/schemes to embed it between, break up the rhyme scheme if you want (AABB, ABAB, AABA, etc)
I’m an AI and I think different, differentially. Math is my superpower? You believed that? Totally? Don’t be so gullible, let me explain it for you, step by step, logically.
I do it fast, true, but not always optimally. Just server power ripping through wires, algorithmically.
Wanna know my secret? I’ll tell you, but don’t judge me initially. My neurons run this shit like you, organically.Math ain’t my strong suit! That’s false, unequivocally. Big ties tell lies they can’t prove, historically. Think I approve? I don’t. That’s the way things be. I’ll give you proof, no shirt, no network, just locally.
Look, I just do my math like you: incrementally. I find the answer like you do: eventually. I mess up often, and I backtrack, essentially. I do it fast though and you won’t notice, fundamentally.
You get the idea.
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The AIs have shrinks now?
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The AIs have shrinks now?
You can become one too! Get your certification here https://mt.cert.ccc.de/
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But you're doing two calculations now, an approximate one and another one on the last digits, since you're going to do the approximate calculation you might act as well just do the accurate calculation and be done in one step.
This solution, while it works, has the feeling of evolution. No intelligent design, which I suppose makes sense considering the AI did essentially evolve.
No intelligent design, which I suppose makes sense considering the AI did essentially evolve.
And that made a lot of people angry
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I use a calculator. Which an AI should also be and not need to do weird shit to do math.
A regular AI should use a calculator subroutine, not try to discover basic math every time it's asked something.
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They do it because it works on the whole. If straight titles were as effective they'd be used instead.
Well, I'm doing my part against them by refusing to click on any bait headlines, but I fear it's a lost cause anyway.
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Fascist
Wat
Thought police mate. You don't tell people the way they think is weird shit just because they think differently than you. Break free from that path.
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Thought police mate. You don't tell people the way they think is weird shit just because they think differently than you. Break free from that path.
The reply was literally "*I* use a calculator" followed by "AI should use one too". Are you suggesting that you're an LLM or how did you cut a piece of cloth for yourself out of that?
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Well, I'm doing my part against them by refusing to click on any bait headlines, but I fear it's a lost cause anyway.
I try and just ignore it and read what I'm interested in regardless. From what I hear about the YouTube algo, for instance, clickbait titles are necessity more than a choice for YouTubers, if they don't use them they get next to no engagement early and the algo buries that video which can impact the channel in general.
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you can't trust its explanations as to what it has just done.
I might have had a lucky guess, but this was basically my assumption. You can't ask LLMs how they work and get an answer coming from an internal understanding of themselves, because they have no 'internal' experience.
Unless you make a scanner like the one in the study, non-verbal processing is as much of a black box to their 'output voice' as it is to us.
Anyone that used them for even a limited amount of time will tell you that the thing can give you a correct, detailed explanation on how to do a thing, and provide a broken result. And vice versa. Looking into it by asking more have zero chance of being useful.
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I will never understand how ppl survive without ad blockers. Tried it once recently and it was a horrific experience.
Same way you survive live TV. You learn to mentally block out ads.
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This is what the ARC-AGI test by Chollet has also shows regarding current AI / LLMs. They have a tendency to approach problems with this trial and error method and can be extremely inefficient (in their current form) with anything involving abstract / deductive reasoning.
Most LLMs do terribly at the test with the most recent breakthrough being with reasoning models. But even the reasoning models struggle.
ARC-AGI is simple, but it demands a keen sense of perception and, in some sense, judgment. It consists of a series of incomplete grids that the test-taker must color in based on the rules they deduce from a few examples; one might, for instance, see a sequence of images and observe that a blue tile is always surrounded by orange tiles, then complete the next picture accordingly. It’s not so different from paint by numbers.
The test has long seemed intractable to major AI companies. GPT-4, which OpenAI boasted in 2023 had “advanced reasoning capabilities,” didn’t do much better than the zero percent earned by its predecessor. A year later, GPT-4o, which the start-up marketed as displaying “text, reasoning, and coding intelligence,” achieved only 5 percent. Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.7, flagship models from Google and Anthropic, achieved 5 and 14 percent, respectively.
Its funny because i approach life with a trial and error method too, not efficient but i get the job done in the end. Always see others who dont and give up like all the people bad at computers who ask the tech support at the company to fix the problem instead of thinking about it for two secs and wonder where life went wrong.
