this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

It doesn’t read on demand, it reads once when it’s being trained, and it later recalls what it learnt from that training.

Training LLMs takes a very long time and a lot of hardware power.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

If it doesn't read it on demand, how does it sometimes spill its training data verbatim then?

The trained model shouldn't have that, right? But it does?

https://m.slashdot.org/story/422185

[–] 8uurg 4 points 7 months ago

These models have so many parameters that, while insufficient to memorize all text it has ever seen, it can end up memorizing some of the content. It is the difference between being able to recall a random passage versus recalling the exact thing you need. Both allow you to spill content verbatim, but one is problematic while the other can be helpful.

There are techniques to allow it it 'read on demand', but they are not part of the core model (i.e. the autocmpletion model / LLM) and are tacked on top of it. For example, you can tie it search engine, which Microsoft's copilot does, and is something which I don't think is enabled for ChatGPT by default. Or allow it to query a external data bank (Retrieval Augmented Generation).

[–] abruptly8951 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you read a song on demand when you are singing the lyrics verbatim?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It doesn’t read on demand

Yes, it does, from the information it was trained on (or - stored), which like you say, requires a lot of hardware power so it can be accessed on demand. It isn't just manifesting the information out of thin air, and it definitely doesn't "remember" in the same way we do (E: even the best photographic memory isn't the same as an indexable one).

[–] abruptly8951 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It's definitely not indexed, we use RAG architectures to add indexing to data stores that we want the model to have direct access to, the relevant information is injected directly in the context (prompt). This can somewhat be equated to short term memory

The rest of the information is approximated in the weights of the neural network which gives the model general knowledge and intuition..akin to long term memory

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

or it can be equated to a shitty database and lossy compression (with artifacts in the form of “hallucinations”), but that doesn’t make the tech sound particularly smart, does it?

but half the posts in your history are in this thread and that’s too many already

[–] abruptly8951 0 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] -5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

People have such crazy misconceptions about AI. Glad to see someone else knows how it works at least.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

awww, I just got another bowl of popcorn!

but rofl holy shit at "glad to see someone else knows how they work" given the ..... depth of understanding, shall we say? that was demonstrated in this thread