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Comment by RugnirViking

4 days ago

Have you tried asking jev to predict the result of a con flip? My one and only prompt to jev so far has been that. After I 90% heads as a result, I figured I'd wait a bit before checking again to see if this tech has become useful

You'll get 50% prediction accuracy for a fair coin no matter what result a model gives. Try testing adversarial games. Mixed strategies make actual sense in them.

  • The model gives a probability distribution as an answer; you can check to see if two arbitrarily chosen probability distributions are similar or not.

    • I mean predicting the result of a fair coin toss is not a classification task those models are trained to do. It can be framed as a decision making task, but for a fair coin any probability distribution of heads/tails will do equally well.

      BTW, for a task of predicting a 51/49 biased coin, the correct answer is 100/0.

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No matter what answer is given, the prediction success rate is 50%. There’s no difference between the model giving a head answer 90% of the time and 50% of the time.

That's like not using an LLM for coding assistance because it can't count r's in strawberry.

A probabilistic system that cannot reliably reproduce probabilities - somewhat ironic, but absolutely not its purpose.

  • It’s not really ironic since the goal of the system is to reduce variance. Or I guess ironic in the same way as it is that the Buckingham Palace guards just stand there when they could leave at any time.

Try asking it to write a program to predict coin flips. That's what it is trained to do.

  • Jev literally cannot write programs.

    • Well, you can always ask it to predict a next bit in the code. Or even a letter. Maybe combine multiple letter into one and call it a token. We'll give a name to a procedure that gets tokens - decode. To improve speed, we can predict multiple tokens speculatively. To improve quality we'll give it extra space to store Chain of Thought. Ah, wait, we just invented LLMs

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    • My bad, maybe I read it wrong or the comment was edited, but I was referring to LLMs in general. You won't get a fair coin flip from the model either way.