Comment by lanyard-textile
4 days ago
It's a fun question but the models aren't designed for questions like that.
iirc, Jev has a "jaggedness" page that lists known problem areas with the model, and plain mathematics (which I'd argue this is) is one of them.
This is common knowledge though, and not some deep math problem, small children understand this concept.
If they cannot get something so simple right, while at the same time offered as a decision with likelihoods machine, why should I trust their other answers with "probability" they produce?
Here's another post that shows how fragile or inconsistent, even dangerous, these decision models can be: https://zachlandes.com/trolley-problem/
Don't use decision models with important decisions, especially those that involve human lives or irreversible choices
I think a better way to view these numbers is that they are "confidence" levels, not probabilities in the sense you are interpreting.
You should never trust the machine. ;) But you can have a level of confidence with it, and you can know where it's strong and weak.
This is a language association machine, not a math and probability machine. It is specifically weak with any real math.
As simple as a coin flip is -- as simple as a child may be able to understand it -- the machine is specifically not designed to produce an accurate mathematical probability.
That's just not how LLMs work. It's not how they're designed. Nor these decision models which use identical principals.
All that aside... agreed regardless. Irreversible choices should never be finalized by such a volatile technology, regardless of how well we benchmark it. If there's even a chance it could be wrong, that is unacceptable.
> not probabilities in the sense you are interpreting
I am not interpreting them that way, that's how they are being sold by the companies behind them. I do not think "confidence" is accurate either. As far as we can tell, and in the open source/model versions, it's derived logit values.
> You should never trust the machine
Rule #2 https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html
> coin flip...
LLM's get this one exactly right in my limited testing "50/50, 100% confident"