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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2434 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs

As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt

A typical definition of '' would be '

both produce, with greedy sampling, the output

a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.

Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:

  • If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.

  • It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)

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