• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•"Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth."English
    1·
    4 months ago

    I’m in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It’s one of those things where AI bros will go, “Look, it’s so good at poetry!!” but they have no taste and can’t even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It’s a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that’s a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.

    slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they’d work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is “small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!”)

    I don’t think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.

    Orange site example:

    Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]

    I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]

    Reddit:

    I think that’s cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)

    It’s the first time I’ve used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I’m very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.

    For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I’ve actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can’t imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024English
    11·
    6 months ago

    I know this shouldn’t be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they’re talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery

    I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”, submitted on 22 Jan 2024.

    It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.

    Then he immediately follows up with:

    Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.

    Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].

    Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.

    I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024English
    9·
    7 months ago

    I feel like the Internet Archive is a prime target for techfashy groups. Both for the amount of culture you can destroy, and because backed up webpages often make people with an ego the size of the sun look stupid.

    Also, I can’t remember but didn’t Yudkowsky or someone else pretty plainly admit to taking a bunch of money during the FTX scandal? I swear he let slip that the funds were mostly dried up. I don’t think it was ever deleted, but that’s the sort of thing you might want to delete and could get really angry about being backed up in the Internet Archive. I think Siskind has edited a couple articles until all the fashy points were rounded off and that could fall in a similar boat. Maybe not him specifically, but there’s content like that that people would rather not be remembered and the Internet Archive falling apart would be good news to them.

    Also (again), it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours. Like it’d take one crazy person to do serious damage to it. I don’t know but I’m hoping their >100PB of storage is including backups, even if it’s not 3-2-1. I’m only mildly paranoid about it lol.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoButtcoin@awful.systems•No Refunds: The Gala Games Saga by Jauwn ["Web3.0 gaming" scam review]English
    10·
    7 months ago

    Every time I see these crypto games, I can only think of the online uwu pit bosses shown in that one Folding Ideas video who were driving workers to slave away for less than the minimum wage in the Phillipines. Just permanently burned-in mental imagery.

    This is a cool channel by the way. I’m stealing this description from someone in the YouTube comments, but he has a creative “glitchcore SFM aesthetic” that I kind of like and his speaking cadence reminds me of Primer. His style works strangely well for ripping into NFT games. This video felt like looking into a funhouse mirror dimension where every genre of game is somehow even worse than the worst games I’ve ever seen.

    Also, the Dr. Disrespect-Chewbacca mask guy doing NFT lootbox openings is something I can’t unsee. That’s honestly so much funnier that he’s still doing it after the Dr. Disrespect sexting minors scandal.