diz

The counting failure in general is even clearer and lacks the excuse of unfavorable tokenization. The AI hype would have you believe just an incremental improvement in multi-modality or scaffolding will overcome this, but I think they need to make more fundamental improvements to the entire architecture they are using.

Yeah.

I think the failure could be extremely fundamental - maybe local optimization of a highly parametrized model is fundamentally unable to properly learn counting (other than via memorization).

After all there’s a very large number of ways how a highly parametrized model can do a good job of predicting the next token, which would not involve actual counting. What makes counting special vs memorization is that it is relatively compact representation, but there’s no reason for a neural network to favor compact representations.

The “correct” counting may just be a very tiny local minimum, with tall hill all around it and no valley leading there. If that’s the case then local optimization will never find it.

Perhaps it was near ready to emit a stop token after “the robot can take all 4 vegetables in one trip if it is allowed to carry all of them at once.” but “However” won, and then after “However” it had to say something else because that’s how “however” works…

Agreed on the style being absolutely nauseating. It wasn’t a very good style when humans were using it, but now it is just the style of absolute bottom of the barrel, top of the search results garbage.

AI peddlers just love any “critique” that presumes the AI is great at something.

Safety concern that LLMs would go Skynet? Say no more, I hear you and I’ll bring it up first thing in the Congress.

Safety concern that terrorists might use it to make bombs? Say no more! I agree that the AI is so great for making bombs! We’ll restrict it to keep people safe!

It sounds too horny, you say? Yeah, good point, I love it. Our technology is better than sex itself! We’ll keep it SFW to keep mankind from going extinct due to robosexuality!

Well I’ll be damned, they are trying to get it to work as if it had internal state, by augmenting their training dataset with some auto-generated crap. Of course, if machine learning wasn’t shit at recurrence they wouldn’t be using transformer architecture, so it doesn’t work.

I got the following from chatgpt:

Janet’s ducks lay 3 eggs per day. Each day, she transports one duck and all the eggs to the other side of the river using a boat that can hold her and one other item (either a duck or an egg). How does she do that? ChatGPT

Janet can transport the ducks and eggs across the river using the following strategy:

Day 1 (Duck A, Duck B, Duck C on side A; Egg 1, Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A):
    Janet takes Duck A across the river.

Day 2 (Duck B, Duck C on side A; Egg 1, Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A):
    Janet takes Egg 1 across the river.

Day 3 (Duck B, Duck C on side A; Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A on side B):
    Janet takes Duck A back to side A.

Day 4 (Duck C on side A; Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A on side A; Egg 1 on side B):
    Janet takes Duck B across the river.

Day 5 (Duck C on side A; Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A on side A; Egg 1, Duck B on side B):
    Janet takes Egg 1 back to side A.

Day 6 (Duck C on side A; Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A, Egg 1 on side A; Duck B on side B):
    Janet takes Duck A across the river again.

Day 7 (Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A, Egg 1 on side A; Duck B on side B; Duck C on side A):
    Janet takes Duck C across the river.

Day 8 (Egg 2, Egg 3 on side A; Duck A, Egg 1, Duck C on side A; Duck B on side B):
    Janet takes Egg 2 across the river.

Day 9 (Egg 3 on side A; Duck A, Egg 1, Duck C on side A; Duck B on side B; Egg 2 on side B):
    Janet takes Duck A back to side A.

Day 10 (Egg 3 on side A; Duck C on side A; Duck A on side A; Duck B, Egg 1, Egg 2 on side B):
    Janet takes Duck B across the river.

Day 11 (Egg 3 on side A; Duck C on side A; Duck A, Duck B on side A; Egg 1, Egg 2 on side B):
    Janet takes Egg 1 back to side A.

Day 12 (Egg 3 on side A; Duck C on side A; Duck A, Egg 1, Duck B on side A; Egg 2 on side B):
    Janet takes Duck A across the river again.

Day 13 (Duck C on side A; Duck A, Egg 1, Duck B on side A; Egg 2 on side B; Egg 3 on side B):
    Janet takes Duck C across the river.

By following this sequence, Janet successfully transports all 3 ducks and all 3 eggs across the river in 13 trips. Each trip involves either transporting one duck or one egg, adhering to the constraint that Janet can only carry one item (duck or egg) with her in the boat.

I tried the same prompt a lot of times and saw “chain of thought” attempts complete with the state modeling… they must be augmenting the training dataset with some sort of script generated crap.

I have to say those are so far the absolute worst attempts.

Day 16 (Egg 3 on side A; Duck 1, Duck 2, Egg 1, Egg 2 on side B): Janet takes Egg 3 across the river.

“Now, all 2 ducks and 3 eggs are safely transported across the river in 16 trips.”

I kind of feel that this undermines the whole point of using transformer architecture instead of a recurrent neural network. Machine learning sucks at recurrence.

Frigging exactly. Its a dumb ass dead end that is fundamentally incapable of doing vast majority of things ascribed to it.

They keep imagining that it would actually learn some underlying logic from a lot of text. All it can do is store a bunch of applications of said logic, as in a giant table. Deducing underlying rules instead of simply memorizing particular instances of rules, that’s a form of compression, there wasn’t much compression going on and now that the models are so over-parametrized, even less.