this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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It doesn't need to be filtered into human / AI content. It needs to be filtered into good (true) / bad (false) content. Or a "truth score" for each.
We don't teach children to read by just handing them random tweets. We give them books that are made specifically for children. Our filtering mechanism for good / bad content is very robust for humans. Why can't AI just read every piece of "classic literature", famous speeches, popular books, good TV and movie scripts, textbooks, etc?
That isn't enough because the model isn't able to reason.
I'll give you an example. Suppose that you feed the model with both sentences:
Both sentences are true. And based on vocabulary of both, the model can output the following sentences:
Both are false but the model doesn't "know" it. All that it knows is that "have" is allowed to go after both "cats" and "birds", and that both "feathers" and "fur" are allowed to go after "have".
It's not just a predictive text program. That's been around for decades. That's a common misconception.
As I understand it, it uses statistics from the whole text to create new text. It would be very rare to output "cats have feathers" because that phrase doesn't ever appear in the training data. Both words "have feathers" never follow "cats".
This isn't really accurate either. At the moment of generation, an LLM only has context for the input string and the network of text tokens it's been assigned. It pulls from a "pool" of these tokens based on what it's already output and the input context, nothing more.
Most LLMs have what are called "Top P", "Top K" etc, these are the number of tokens that it ends up selecting from based on the previous token, alongside the input tokens. It then randomly chooses one based on temperature settings.
It's why if you turn these models' temperature settings really high they output pure nonsense both conceptually and grammatically, because the tenuous thread linking the previous token's context to the next token has been widened enough that it completely loses any semblance of cohesiveness.