One thing I see a lot on X is people asking Grok what movie or show a scene is from.
LLMs must be really, really bad at this because not only is it never right, it actually just makes something up that doesn't exist. Every, single, time.
I really wish it would just say "I'm not good at this, so I do not know."
When your model of the world is build on the relative probabilities of the next opaque apparently-arbitrary number in context of prior opaque apparently-arbitrary numbers, it must be nearly impossible to tell the difference between “there are several plausible ways to proceed, many of which the user will find useful or informative, and I should pick one” and “I don’t know”. Attempting to adjust to allow for the latter probably tends to make the things output “I don’t know” all the time, even when the output they’d have otherwise produced would have been good.
I thought about this of course, and I think a reasonable 'hack' for now is to more or less hardcode things that your LLM sucks at, and override it to say it doesn't know. Because continually failing at basic tasks is bad for confidence in said product.
I mean, it basically does the same thing if you ask it to do anything racist or offensive, so that override ability is obviously there.
So if it identifies the request as identifying a movie scene, just say 'I don't know', for example.
Hardcode by whom? Who do we trust with this task to do it correctly? Another LLM that suffers from the same fundamental flaw or by a low paid digital worker in a developing country? Because that's the current solution. And who's gonna pay for all that once the dumb investment money runs out, who's gonna stick around after the hype?
By the LLM team (Grok team, in this case). I don't mean for the LLM to be sentient enough to know it doesn't know the answer, I mean for the LLM to identify what is being asked of it, and checking to see if that's something on the 'blacklist of actions I cannot do yet', said list maintained by humans, before replying.
No different than when asking ChatGPT to generate images or videos or whatever before it could, it would just tell you it was unable to.
One thing I see a lot on X is people asking Grok what movie or show a scene is from.
LLMs must be really, really bad at this because not only is it never right, it actually just makes something up that doesn't exist. Every, single, time.
I really wish it would just say "I'm not good at this, so I do not know."