(littlelearner-ll.github.io)
One word that few wealthy people ever hear, is “No.” It has a pretty significant effect on their worldview.
Even the most reasonable, well-informed, well-intentioned wealthy folks can have their thinking affected. When every silly, should-be-smothered-in-the-crib idea gets enthusiastically endorsed by your entourage, it’s easy to lose the ability to self-regulate.
Obsequious LLMs are leveling the field. Less wealthy folks are starting to have the chance to lose their ability to self-regulate, just like rich folks.
Regardless the frontier model considered, we're certainly in a "know-it-all" era.
Maybe the sort of introspective prompt-response is difficult to implement when it could limit/contaminate future improvement. I speculate it's easier to correct a "confidently incorrect" model than a "I don't know" model. A confidently incorrect model response >=0% correct over a 0% correct (I don't know).
Maybe "I don't know" is a model cognito hazard of sorts when many queries can lead back to the response. Maybe future Turing tests will use this sort of introspective evaluation. Who knows? I don't :)
How does a fan work: Swish swish swish swish
Where do these clouds come from: Points to a far away direction in the sky and says they come from there.
Who does all these roads, trees and environment belong to? It all belongs to me. Obviously.
They have an answer ready for every question you throw at them and they will answer it with absolute certainty. I will have to wait and see at what age does the concept of "I don't know" develop.
Yesterday I decarboxylated some weed buds in preparation of making a cannabis tincture using the QWET method. Curious how Claude would respond, I asked how to do it.
It walked me through the process and gave accurate, nuanced answers.
Let me know what your 2 year old thinks I should do.
I have actually gotten "hey i don't think this is a good idea, here's why" as feedback from at least Opus. It WILL still do it if I just demand stupidity (and hell i've been right, which is another topic entirely) but it has given me more confidence this can be a useful tool in the right spots.
That said I probably don't need the top tiers (metrics at least confirm that) and I'm guessing that's specifically because I was working in coding. Most were worded in a "is this a good idea" framing which probably helped, but at least once I said 'lets use this library/method" and it gave a decent argument on why that was basically redundant without prompting.
I still struggle to see the price point panning out.
Over the last 3 years I've seen projects where I thought, pretty obviously that's a bad idea. But, because LLMs don't say no and can just be pushed to build it anyway, the people building them might never learn that or learn why.
It's nice to be able to have a quick prototype or mvp. But if we never hit friction or something not working out, we never learn or have to come up with a creative solution.
Now, the LLM might seem incredibly intelligent (relatively speaking) and also creative but let's not forget that all is based on its training data. I simply don't believe it can ever be omniscient or that the companies training it are careful enough when doing so.
You're asking a lot from extremely fancy auto complete...
There's also a second aspect to it, just in terms of RLHF mechanisms. If you've ever experimented with VLA models (i.e. vision input + text task = robotic arm motion output), they tend to need all the training examples of the robotic arm being motionless removed entirely, otherwise the model simply learns that staying still is rewarded and proceeds to never do anything at all. You successfully train the laziest bot in the universe. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to LLMs if reinforcement learning is involved in the instruct tuning process. If no is a valid answer, why ever do anything?
It's relevant to AI safety. If you have a diversity of outputs, the AI will agree to hack the bank 0.1% of the time regardless. If you have a uniformity of outputs, in most contexts the AI will hack the bank 0% of the time, but in certain odd contexts, all AIs will work together to hack the bank 100% of the time.
LLMs, incidentally, respond in a similar pattern in my experience.
Even an 8yo has better metacognition, it seems. :-)
> The sky is blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. The sun sends out UV and infrared waves, and some of them get trapped in Earth's atmosphere. When the waves hit the tiny molecules in our atmosphere, they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes.
"filtered to the U.S. elementary-school curriculum", suuure
Perhaps the unexpected response comes from its recall ability. It’s not the personality of a child, just the material a child is exposed to.
A LLM does not learn topic by topic, it learns everything all at once and slowly integrates it in to a single knowledge system.
(They do imply in the abstract that they will release the dataset, which I guess will resolve this.)
> Me: "What's semiotic crystallography? > Response: "I don't know, what is it?"
Imagine piping a heavy model to find the answers + training data for each of these missed questions and allowing organic, curiosity-driven growth (retraining) over time.
I'm assuming the knowledge doesn't end up as separate "layers".
I'm also reminded of how the human mind develops in distinct stages (e.g. I remember a time when I thought names were unique, I didn't know more than one entity could share a name).
> It's a cat that has been misbehavin'!
This could be seen as an amusingly extreme example of the fact that if you come up with something and state it condidently enough, a surprisingly large number of people will assume you what you're talking about. Presumably, though, you just mistook the unfiltered (trained on the full data) response for the "Little Learner" one.