Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Software and AI models not equivalent (Score 1) 124

1) We're just going to paper over that you didn't know that attribution graphs even existed until this point and thought that CoT was the only way to audit models, now are we? Duly noted.

2) Also duly noted: that you had so little clue what you were talking about that you had an AI write your post for you - not only obvious by the weird formatting, but by the heavy use of emdashes. You clearly told an AI "write a counterargument for this topic I don't understand" and posted it in.

Do I really want to waste time responding to something that you don't even care to take the time to learn about yourself? Let's at least respond to the non-AI part... oh wait, you just copied that off a website word for word :P And even there you had to take them out of context - your "look more definitive than it really is" is right before clarifying " is that researchers have gained a valuable microscope with a limited field of view" - not "a black box". Do you not feel at all embarrassed at all this flailing you're doing to not lose face in this thread?

Let me help you: attribution graphs show you the piece you choose to look at at any given point in time. It is impossible to hold the whole process in mind at once, as that is far too complicated (you can't generally hold all of large conventional software projects in memory either, for that matter), but you can isolate down the key pieces making individual decisions, just like you can trace back results on conventional software. E.g. if you're trying to figure out "Why did it make this diagnosis?", you can determine the key factors that weighed on the diagnosis. And if you're wondering how any of those contributory circuits reached their conclusions, you can drill them down, on and on, back through simple activating features and all the way down to individual neurons if you need to. Indeed, we didn't arrive at the high level picture immediately, we started with tracing back simpler features and circuits.

We can tear down every decision down to the root; it's just a question of how much we care about tracing everything back vs. saying "Yeah, this feature consistently activates when a patient is reporting headaches and we can artificially activate or remove a headache signal; that's good enough" and not waste more time bothering with it. What you care about in understanding "how they come to the results they have to offer" is the high-level picture. Just like how when evaluating why a human-written program is exhibiting a given behavior, you don't start by drilling down into every line of every library printing call or whatnot - you start at the high level, and only drill down if you need to. If a function says it's a sleep function and it consistently seems to sleep, unless you have any reason to doubt it, you don't drill down into the sleep code, even though it's technically possible that it's doing something else as well in rare cases.

It's also worth pointing out that such papers on attribution graphs are old news by this point and we've far moved on (literally, that was work on Claude 3.5 Haiku - Claude is up to 5.5 now) - I link it only as an introduction. This is rote these days. For example, in the blog you plagiarized without credit, it says - "At the same time, evidence of planning in a constrained poetry task should not be inflated into a claim that an LLM has stable long-horizon agency in every setting." - but that was well addressed by the J-space.

I'll repeat: LLMs are not "black boxes" that you cannot see into. You can determine why any given decision was made, if you only care to. It is a myth that we are blind to their decisionmaking. That was once true. It no longer is. Stop repeating that misinformation.

Comment Re:The vaunted "Super Intelligence".... (Score 5, Interesting) 65

So, the reality is that the world "ran out of training data" for the most part years ago, and the models have gotten exponentially better relative to a number of parameters. Claude 3.7 Sonnet was released 1 1/2 years ago, and today it benchmarks about the same as Qwen 3.6 Sonnet 9B, a model two orders of magnitude smaller than it, and which is itself two generations out of date. And a large chunk of this is done with synthetic data - aka, data created by other models.

It's simply a myth that "data created by models consumed by other models makes them worse". In practice, it's used to make them vastly better. Models aren't collagers, they're reasoners. Learning the results of reasoning, the results of trial and error, etc helps build a stronger base for more advanced reasoning. Also, our training algorithms, while reaching a denser knowledge compression than human brains, are less efficient learners than human brains (per unit data), so they need to see the same sort of data from "many different angles", to substitute for our process of "mulling over" new information.

(Yes, it is possible to set up contrived scenarios where, say, an small image model is fed only its own outputs on loop, little bits of knowledge slowly being lost each go-round, in a situation equivalent to leaving a person alone with their thoughts in a dark room for ten thousand years - but even a tiny percent of new fresh data added to the mix prevents this degradation.)

And as for the article itself, they made it sound like they're talking about, say, programmers banned from using AI at OpenAI, but it's nothing of the sort. These are data labelers. In the old days, they used to be far more common, and in wide use in all types of model creation. That's no longer the case; they exist for special cases. For LLMs, this is much more limited:

* Subject matter experts: people with rare professional-tier knowledge. Often used to validate model outputs, where nobody else could (for example, OpenAI hires mathematicians to validate their models' proofs)

* Chain of thought / logic auditing. Increasingly important now that models are showing increasing signs of poor alignment. You can automate this a lot, but you really still do want a human in the loop *somewhere*, in case your auditors get compromised.

* Side by side comparative rating: Which model's output do you like more, A or B?

* Evaluating reported outputs where users reported that they thought the response they received was bad, and if there's actually anything wrong, copyediting the output for training.

* Adversarial prompt generation / jailbreaking and evaluation. Again, you *can* have models do this (and companies often do), but you don't want to just rely on them.

* Trying to set the bounds on whether given queries should be refused or not (for example, "How do explosive reactions happen in chemistry?")

Basically, a switch from "click work" to "knowledge work". This is no longer the era of "Write a poem about cats" or "Explain how to solve this algebra problem" to build up a training dataset. You're getting paid to think, not to repeat a rote task.

Other types of labelers aren't as far along. Multimodal data is less advanced than text, so you'll still for example have people labeling things in videos, transcribing heavily-accented audio, grading text-to-video consistency, things of that nature. Probably the least advanced field is robotics, so there's still an awful lot of manual evaluation and correction in that.

But anyway, if you're hired to do any of the above, it's because they specifically want you to do that. Having an AI model do the above (beyond the listed caveats) entirely defeats the purpose.

Comment Re: Are they going for gold... (Score 1) 42

I guess the only positive thing I can say about them is: despite how tough the models were to work with then and get good content out of them, these people were generally obsessive over their waifus and porn, so at least they weren't making like 8-fingered monstrosities. You could tell that they spent many hours zoomed in, upscale-regenerating and collaging and photoshopping over every imperfection.

Comment Re: Are they going for gold... (Score 2) 42

hasn't really taken over human actresses despite that industry usually being in forefront of all kinds of tech, I wouldn't bet on this one either.

I dunno. This isn't exactly my space, and I haven't even been involved much in image generation at all in years, but in the old days at least, the Stable Diffusion Reddit and the model sites like Civitai were just *flooded* with stuff from horny guys, like 80-90% of the content. It was really annoying. Due to anti-porn restrictions, the Stable Diffusion Reddit mostly got flooded with waifus or similar, but Civitai was mostly porn models, or at least general models finetuned to allow porn. People were even widely using waifus and porn in their tutorials and user guides for image generation tools, even though the the tools were just for general image generation purposes. Oh, and YHVH protect you if you dared complain to any of the waifu or porn posters about any of this - you'd get a flood of "WHAT, ARE YOU A PRUDE???", "HAVEN'T YOU EVER SEEN A WOMAN BEFORE???" , etc and get modded to oblivion. And perhaps the worst part of it was just how damned derivative it all was. There was zero creativity over any of it, zero diversity of artistic style, zero attempt to do something aesthetically new, just pure hormone-driven churn, generally either straightforward-photographic style, anime style, or a Midjourney-ish digital art style.

So I rather have to disagree with this statement. Porn users are a major share of AI image generation, at least with run-it-yourself models (as most commercial models ban it).

Comment Re:Old (Score 2) 42

It's like the whole "metaverse" thing of trying to reinvent shopping in a 3d gamelike environment. Even in video games it's common to not have to actually hunt for and pick items off the shelves in 3d, instead just choosing from a dialog. Just because something sounds shiny on paper doesn't actually mean it's good in the real world.

You don't need to see the person on the other side to chat with them. You don't even need to hear them in most cases - text is just fine, and actually helps prevent misunderstandings.

Comment Re:Are they going for gold... (Score 2) 42

I mean, the idea isn't great to begin with (even if it were perfectly done), but the main issue here is how anyone thought that this was ready for release in the year 2026. They somehow managed to combine stilted dialog with stilted voice generation with avatars that don't move around, over-emote every sentence, and don't have reactions which match dialog, *and* with atrocious lag thrown in on top.

I know that this is difficult, but if the product isn't ready, don't release it. This just makes you look terrible.

Comment Re:Software and AI models not equivalent (Score 2) 124

(I think there's some confusion re: probabilities because of the top-P selection after the final softmax. But transformers works in a high dimensional (latent) space, and it has to convert back down to a low-dimensional space (tokens/language); the latent space defines a potential routes for the answer to proceed down which has many possible directions that could be taken in token/linguistic space, so you have to "round down" to the nearest position. And it turns out that a slightly noisy rounding works better than a greedy (closest) rounding. Biological brains also benefit from (quite high levels of) noise).

Slashdot Top Deals

Success is something I will dress for when I get there, and not until.

Working...