Comment by 101008

8 days ago

It's an example that shows that if these models aren't trained in a specific problem, they may have a hard time solving it for you.

An analogy is asking someone who is colorblind how many colors are on a sheet of paper. What you are probing isn't reasoning, it's perception. If you can't see the input, you can't reason about the input.

  • > What you are probing isn't reasoning, it's perception.

    Its both. A colorblind person will admit their shortcomings and, if compelled to be helpful like an LLM is, will reason their way to finding a solution that works around their limitations.

    But as LLMs lack a way to reason, you get nonsense instead.

    • What tools does the LLM have access to that would reveal sub-token characters to it?

      This assumes the colorblind person both believes it is true that they are colorblind, in a world where that can be verified, and possesses tools to overcome these limitations.

      You have to be much more clever to 'see' an atom before the invention of a microscope, if the tool doesn't exist: most of the time you are SOL.

No, it’s an example that shows that LLMs still use a tokenizer, which is not an impediment for almost any task (even many where you would expect it to be, like searching a codebase for variants of a variable name in different cases).

  • the question remains: is the tokenizer going to be a fundamental limit to my task? how do i know ahead of time?

    • Would it limit a person getting your instructions in Chinese? Tokenisation pretty much means that the LLM is reading symbols instead of phonemes.

      This makes me wonder if LLMs works better in Chinese.