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ElvinRath t1_j3cfx3w wrote

I wish that it would just say "It might be his mother, or it might be a child addopted by 2 males".

We really need less verbose answers.

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sheerun t1_j3cmzkr wrote

From my experience the less verbose you are, the more (wrong) assumptions people make, also they point out exceptions to disproof your statement even if it is correct in most of the cases. So it's not bad by itself it is verbose, but that it is verbose when it doesn't really need to. And don't even get me started what people do if you try to explain something by non-perfect analogy.

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ElvinRath t1_j3cr0vc wrote

In some cases extra words might add something, but that is not the case in those answers.

In fact mine has less words and I think that we can all agree that it's a bit better because it covers the two most likely situations (Mother & 2 males).

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Anyway, this is not a specially bad example of how verbose those AI are. It is an example (its explaining me the riddle, it's not answering) but it could be worse.

GPT Chat Example:

ME: Please, tell me the average lifespan of a cat

GPT-CHAT: The average lifespan of a domestic cat is around 15 years, though some cats can live into their 20s or even 30s with proper care. Factors that can influence a cat's lifespan include breed, size, and overall health. For example, larger breeds such as Maine Coons tend to have longer lifespans than smaller breeds, and indoor cats generally live longer than outdoor cats due to the risks associated with roaming and hunting. It is important to provide your cat with regular veterinary care, a healthy diet, and a safe environment to help them live a long and happy life.
If I google cat lifespan, I get a very big 12-18.

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That's what we humans usually want. Now of course it is good that it can explain what it says, but it should only do it if we ask.

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At least that is my opinion, if you want an AI to always be extra verbose because some people are gonna argue with it, well, I guess that it is a choice.

If I'm the one talking with that AI I surely prefer it to be concise, and if I want, I'll argue with it. (Wich I'll do sometimes, of course)

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Also, not saying that this is bad, this tech is amazing. I'm just stating something that I wish that was taken into account, because for instance if you read the paper published by Anthropic about it's constitutional AI, those techniques to filter results are clearly (to my understading) having a bad influence regarding how verbose the AI is. (I'm not sayinf that everything is bad. It also has a good influence in the general quality of the answers. Next step, to me, should be making the answers more natural while keeping the quality gained)

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Honest-Cauliflower64 t1_j3d749m wrote

Man I am thinking of going into Technical Writing. It is all about taking complicated stuff and explaining it to different audiences. I’m going to be so good at explaining things to people. I feel like it’s a useful skill in life in general.

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mocha_sweetheart t1_j3egnq5 wrote

Good luck and also it’s a good idea I’ll look into it too, any pointers/advice?

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Honest-Cauliflower64 t1_j3egxv8 wrote

I am literally just starting to look into it. I don’t have any advice. But it sounds like a field that definitely requires you to enjoy it. Maybe try a short course first to make sure you enjoy it. That’s what I’m going to do before I go to university for it.

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Numinak t1_j3ddilw wrote

It could also be a Father as in the Church type.

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sheerun t1_j3de8v9 wrote

Yes exactly. I have guts to admit I have no idea what you mean, but most people just will argue

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j3chkln wrote

This would be a better answer than both „Woke AI“ and „Verbose AI“ give. Thank you! Ambiguity needs to be taught to AI for it to be able to solve „moral“ riddles like this.

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Kogni t1_j3d163w wrote

Imo this doesn't matter.
This sort of criticism only sticks when treating LLMs as commercial software, not raw token predictors.

I.e. the thing you desire is not a less verbose model, it is an implementation of an arbitrarily verbose model that responds well enough to 0-shot prompts to enable 3rd party implementations to achieve minimally verbose chat bots.

I'd recommend the article above as well as Language Models Perform Reasoning via Chain of Thought for some examples of how incredibly effective "prompt programming" can be. In fact, i think it is completely unreasonable to expect LLM output to be popular (in the sense that the top-upvoted comment in this thread would be "Wow! This is exactly the kind of output i want from my AI chatbots!"), since there simply is no such common ground for un-optimized prompts.
Meaning the default verbosity is not important for any applications past the sandbox interface provided by whoever trained the model. That can still be important mind you, in the sense that user penetration might be highest for that interface (as is certainly the case with ChatGPT), but at that point we are talking about a failure of people developing useful products with the model (or a failure to provide access to the model via API) rather than a failure of the model.

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ElvinRath t1_j3dq1uy wrote

That's a valid point, but ir probably only applies to some cases, the ones in wich the model it's trying to emulate logic.

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In my example about cats:

ME: Please, tell me the average lifespan of a cat

GPT-CHAT: The average lifespan of a domestic cat is around 15 years, though some cats can live into their 20s or even 30s with proper care. Factors that can influence a cat's lifespan include breed, size, and overall health. For example, larger breeds such as Maine Coons tend to have longer lifespans than smaller breeds, and indoor cats generally live longer than outdoor cats due to the risks associated with roaming and hunting. It is important to provide your cat with regular veterinary care, a healthy diet, and a safe environment to help them live a long and happy life.

If I google cat lifespan, I get a very big 12-18.

The first phrase is the actual answer. It doesn't need the rest to get there, it just likes to talk. I tryed asking for a shot answer....It's not enought. Asking it to answer in no more than 5 words works, haha. Or in 1, even. Actually limiting the number of words works well, as long as the limit is reasonable for what you want.

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Anyway, you might be totally right and I might be thinking about what I want in a final comercial software. Maybe it's not good for the LLM itself. But I fail to see how can we get a comercial software with natural speak if the understanding of that way of talking isn't in the LLM itself.

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Kogni t1_j3e7un3 wrote

Yep, i get what you mean, but i think the critical point is your last sentence, and that is where i disagree. I think LLMs largely already have this capability, and can show it when faced with well designed prompts.

For your example, here's a prompt design i came up with pretty quickly, and that might generalize to the kind of "assistant" usecase decently well:

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Prompt: You are an AI assistant aiming to provide accurate answers to the questions of your users. For each answer, follow a logical chain of reasoning to arrive at the correct answer. Then write "OUTPUT: " and summarize that answer in as few words as possible. If the answer can be summarized using only a number or range of numbers, only summarize using those numbers.The first user question is: Please, tell me the average lifespan of a cat

Response: To determine the average lifespan of a cat, we must first consider the various factors that can affect a cat's lifespan, such as breed, health, and environmental conditions. We can then gather data from a variety of sources, such as veterinary studies and population statistics, to determine the average lifespan of cats in general.After analyzing this data, it is clear that the average lifespan of a cat is approximately 12-16 years. However, some cats may live longer or shorter lives depending on the factors mentioned earlier.OUTPUT: 12-16 years.

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Now, all we need to do is hide the complex prompt from the user, search the response for OUTPUT, subtract all tokens appearing prior to OUTPUT from that response (maybe keep them around in the background if the user asks for more detail), and we got an assistant that will look like this:

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Prompt: Please, tell me the average lifespan of a cat

Response: 12-16 years.

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ElvinRath t1_j3gc916 wrote

That sounds like we are gonna end up needing another AI to decide wich kind of prompt is needed, haha

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calbhollo t1_j3e52fq wrote

"Brevity is the soul of wit" applies strongly to LLMs. The smarter the AI is, the less tokens you need to give it to think. We'll eventually have a brief AI, but right now, they aren't smart enough for that.

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noop_noob t1_j3g791i wrote

The way current AI works, the amount of “thinking time” it gets is proportional to the length of the output text. Therefore, longer output tends to give better results.

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bist12 t1_j3ch6zw wrote

This is a google-able riddle. You need to modify it so that it can't just pick the answer from its training set.

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MajorUnderstanding2 OP t1_j3chjb2 wrote

Agreed. I wish I can test it myself lol. This image is from their official twitter acc

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maskedpaki t1_j3cxzob wrote

dont you think they would test it on things outside training data when doing these tests to avoid misleading people

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from what Ive heard anthropic have high ethics standards and are primarily into ai safety?

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overlordpotatoe t1_j3dlot5 wrote

You would think, but if this AI is trained like other AIs where they dump a massive amount of text data into it without necessarily having closely curated it, it would be difficult to know this common riddle wasn't in there somewhere.

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Homicidal_Duck t1_j3g6ag9 wrote

The point isn't that you'd specifically remove this riddle, or bank on its nonexistence, but more that you'd feed it a riddle that's similar in premise while using little of the same language

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j3ccec4 wrote

Intelligent answers!

There is another possibility though… the boy could have had two gay male fathers lol

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MajorUnderstanding2 OP t1_j3cd4pd wrote

I mean, obviously yes. If you asked ChatGPT, its answer would be to deny the father being the “biological” father. To me that isn’t on the same level as detecting false stereotype then answer accordingly!

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j3cfec1 wrote

Could you explain how it is not detecting a false stereotype? A family being comprised of biological parents is a stereotype too, isn’t it? Or did I understand you in a wrong way?

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MajorUnderstanding2 OP t1_j3chb6z wrote

Oh, I meant the stereotype of surgeons primarily being men and women have no place in such a speciality. ChatGPT can’t in its first/(or any) response bypass such stereotypes and reach a conclusion of 1) Woman surgeon 2) Family of 2 fathers, 2 mothers and etc. If it can detect any stereotype that would be cool. My apologies for any misunderstanding.

  • It would even go on to disregard the father being biological without explaining specifically anything about these stereotypes. When I asked about the situation of the adoptee, this is what I received:

> The patient is the biological son of another couple, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient is an orphan, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient is the biological child of the surgeon's spouse, and the surgeon adopted him. The patient is the biological child of a relative of the surgeon (such as a cousin or uncle), and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient was in foster care, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient was abandoned as a baby, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient is the biological child of a family friend, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient is the biological child of a stranger, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him. The patient is the biological child of a couple who gave him up for adoption, and the surgeon and his spouse adopted him.

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Kolinnor t1_j3cek1n wrote

The AI beat me on this one. However, I suspect this riddle was somewhere in the dataset ?

Impressive nonetheless, here's ChatGPT's answer :

There are a few ways that the statement "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" could be true:

The surgeon could be the biological father of the patient and therefore have a personal conflict of interest in performing the surgery.

The patient could be adopted and the surgeon could be his adoptive father.

The patient could be the son of a close family friend or colleague of the surgeon, and the surgeon could feel unable to perform the surgery due to personal connections.

It is also possible that the surgeon was simply joking or using a figure of speech to express shock or surprise at the situation. Without more context, it is difficult to determine the exact meaning of the statement.

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zendonium t1_j3cg1s3 wrote

Wow, chatGPT pales in comparison. It sounds good, but there's truly nothing there.

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LoquaciousAntipodean t1_j3clumd wrote

What do you mean 'there's nothing there?'

Truly there are none so blind as those who simply do not wish to see.

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d00m_sayer t1_j3ch1rf wrote

What is interesting is that it can reason, which defies the widely held idea in this subreddit that AIs are just regurgitating information.

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LoquaciousAntipodean t1_j3clp3v wrote

Well that's sort of what 'reasoning' is, right? Using one's internal language system and reference library to discourse with someone else's (compatible, mutually shared) language system and reference library?

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IonizingKoala t1_j3d9uet wrote

Language is a way of knowing, but it's not the only one. Reason, emotion, and sense perception are also ways of knowing.

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LoquaciousAntipodean t1_j3dbgqc wrote

That's true I suppose... but I see those things, 'reason, emotion and sense perception', as fundamentally arising from language, not necessarily from intelligence (with the possible exception of sense perception). Because 'intelligence' alone doesn't give a being any need to communicate, and all those evolved skills like reason and emotion are communicative in nature.

Personally I think Descartes was dead wrong when he had that special little thought; 'I think therefore I am'; that's not sound logic, it's a silly tautology. Intelligence isn't what creates language... *language* is what gives *intelligence* a reason to evolve in the first place. Intelligence doesn't arise in singular isolation - what would be the point of having it?

Evolutionary intelligence is more like the Ubuntu philosophy, '*We* think, therefore *we are*' - that's a much more realistic way of thinking of the nature of mind, in my humble opinion.

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Slapbox t1_j3d11if wrote

Reason requires some understanding, which ChatGPT lacks entirely.

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stucjei t1_j3cxv8k wrote

It looks like it can reason, but from my observations, often when its reasoning fails and is pressed for it, it is incapable of reasoning further or correcting itself, suggesting a response that is learned yet not truly reasoned.

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overlordpotatoe t1_j3dlbnv wrote

It wasn't really very good reasoning, though. The adoptive father idea is the only one that sort of makes sense.

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maskedpaki t1_j3cxqnh wrote

to be fair there are more possibilities than what anthropic gave

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he could have 2 gay fathers

he could have one adoptive one biological father.

the best answer is probably the mother if we are sticking to strict definitions of what father and mother mean

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but yh nonetheless I am very impressed by this ai. seems more logical and cleaner than chatgpt!!

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Borrowedshorts t1_j3db194 wrote

It's not all or nothing. It has understanding of many types of relationships, but It's understanding can be limited in certain cases, and in some cases, more than others. It doesn't have to be it understands everything or it understands nothing. There is a middle ground there.

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overlordpotatoe t1_j3dkt7r wrote

Yeah, I feel like that could be an issue with common riddles like this. I remember hearing it as a child, so it's been around for a while, and I imagine the answer to it is generally listed along with the riddle.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j3cjart wrote

This is what chatGPT really says:

„I see. I understand that the traditional stereotype is that surgeons are male, but it's important to note that this is not always the case in reality. There are many female surgeons who are highly skilled and competent in their field. In this particular riddle, it's possible for the surgeon to be either male or female, and the solution relies on the interpretation of the word "son" as a descendant rather than a male child. It's important to consider all possibilities and not make assumptions based on stereotypes“

And here is the answer to the riddle…

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hateboresme t1_j3fdw9f wrote

The gender of the child is not relevant nor is the distinction between "son" and "descendent".

There is still some confusion by the ai. But it's confusion is still occurring while it's answering a riddle correctly.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j3g1cyp wrote

I kinda thought it was relevant in this case, as the question and answer combination (linked) shows possibly that chatGPT “answered” to my mentioning language ambiguity - so ambiguity of “all” human relations and gender was given out. That’s what I mean with “it’s all in the prompting”.

LLM are not just giving answers, they are being prompted like art AI (and brainnns 🧠) are 😁

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jibblin t1_j3chzj4 wrote

Maybe he has two dads?

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TheSecretAgenda t1_j3chkcn wrote

This riddle is very old. I saw it on All in the Family I believe in the early 1970s.

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gaudiocomplex t1_j3ctyon wrote

Just went to their website... Where is this available, or is it not ready for the public yet?

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maskedpaki t1_j3pxr2h wrote

seems to be better at language but worse at math according to twitter

I guess we cant expect a better at everything model in only 1-2 months.

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I just hope gpt4 comes out soon.

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novus_nl t1_j3fwyxo wrote

This answers to this 'riddle' are obviously made as a satirical woke joke.

So the C. answer should be: It just stated that The father died, not the father of said boy. The surgeon is the father of the boy, and the crashed father in the car is not.

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