Comment by msteffen

8 hours ago

This is neat but IMO a little crazy.

Something I personally haven’t seen much of, in all the discussions of model benchmarks and AI breakthroughs, is a distinction between “peak performance” and “reliable performance”. The “peak performance” of frontier models is very high: they’re solving open math problems, analyzing large codebases, etc. But my subjective impression is that “reliable performance” is mid at best: out of 100 random questions I might think to ask, it’s likely to say something wrong or stupid a handful of times at least.

I think there’s inherent tension between the two: the more a model reaches or outright hallucinates, the more likely it is to come up with tricky, subtle solutions to problems (I think people are somewhat like this too: Terry Tao’s brother is nonverbal, Jim Watson’s son has severe schizophrenia, etc). But then the less likely it is to generate a sensible email reply.

I use models all the time for coding, but I would not let one take over my daily correspondence. If the idea here is to run frontier models at high speed in data centers, that could be useful (the speed would be cool), but I’d be surprised if the cost of that hardware churn is worth it to frontier labs. But if the idea is to turn this into a chip that goes in your phone as some kind of routine, low-power inference thing…taking something too kooky to be relied on and baking it into your phone’s hardware like that doesn’t make sense to me.

8 comments

msteffen

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dumberquestions  7 hours ago

I think you're underestimating both their reliability for standard problems and the usefulness of that level of reliability.

  • tyre  2 hours ago

    This is a good point. Opus does some silly shenanigans sometimes but then catches it later. It’s still an order of magnitude faster at getting to a working system than I am, for ones I don’t know.

    It’s really a dream for setting up a homelab

daishi55  7 hours ago

> out of 100 random questions I might think to ask, it’s likely to say something wrong or stupid a handful of times at least.

What are some examples?

  • msteffen  17 minutes ago

    Well, I wrote my comment after an exchange similar to this, with the linked example chatbot (chatjimmy): https://pastebin.com/uEV7Pm8q

    I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I re-asked it the same problem to create the paste, and it did about as well the second time). It was unable to solve the problem, and it’s a small, old model, so…fair enough…but also its answer was pretty incoherent, with stuff like “Since A is an invariant set, it's always possible to find a cave that the fox cannot be in. Therefore, you can always catch the fox in that cave.” (…catch it…in the cave it can’t be in?).

    Then, off the top of my head: Claude somewhat recently generated a Spark Job where the worker timeout was longer than the worker heartbeat, so workers would always inevitably be killed when they didn’t heartbeat within their timeout window. (also…neither option needed to be set?) Before I noticed the problem, I asked Claude why the job was taking so long, and it told me the data set was too large. More recently, there was a blog post by John Scalzi I was having a hard time finding, so I posed the problem to ChatGPT, and it came back with a blog post that didn’t include any version of the text I remembered and wasn’t really topically relevant (and maybe I hallucinated the blog post, but it could’ve said “I can’t find it” instead of “here you go”). On another occasion, I was trying to find a particular episode of Bob the Builder for my kids, so I Googled it, and Gemini kept giving me the wrong season and episode number, even after several rounds of “no, s5e6 is ‘that thing’, I’m looking for ‘this thing’.” Turned out the episode wasn’t on Amazon at all (which I had to tell it), and I had to go find it on YouTube.

    That said, from scrolling through my history to write this post, they do a better job than I’m giving them credit for. But I still wouldn’t have them write my email for me (the one time I tried that, when I was playing with open claw, it sent a fairly demanding email to someone I didn’t know that well without asking for confirmation, and I had to go apologize and explain that I hadn’t really written the email, which was embarrassing), nor am I particularly excited to have chatjimmy as a permanent resident of my pocket.