Sergii's Shortform

post by Sergii (sergey-kharagorgiev) · 2024-04-24T22:40:45.657Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

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5 comments

5 comments

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comment by Sergii (sergey-kharagorgiev) · 2024-04-24T22:40:45.864Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What about estimating LLM capabilities from the length of a sequence of numbers that it can reverse?

I used prompts like:
"please reverse 4 5 8 1 1 8 1 4 4 9 3 9 3 3 3 5 5 2 7 8"
"please reverse 1 9 4 8 6 1 3 2 2 5"
etc...

Some results:
- Llama2 starts making mistakes after 5 numbers
- Llama3 can do 10, but fails at 20
- GPT-4 can do 20 but fails at 40

The followup questions are:
- what should be the name of this metric?
- are the other top-scoring models like Claude similar? (I don't have access)
- any bets on how many numbers will GPT-5 be able to reverse?
- how many numbers should AGI be able to reverse? ASI? can this be a Turing test of sorts?

Replies from: p.b.
comment by p.b. · 2024-04-25T07:25:14.762Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In psychometrics this is called "backward digit span".

comment by Sergii (sergey-kharagorgiev) · 2025-03-06T18:56:27.134Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

LLMs live in an abstract textual world, and do not understand the real world well (see "[Physical Concept Understanding](https://physico-benchmark.github.io/index.html#)"). We already manipulate LLM's with prompts, cut-off dates, etc... But what about going deeper by “poisoning” the training data with safety-enhancing beliefs?
For example, if training data has lots of content about how hopeless, futile and dangerous for an AI it is to scheme and hack, it might be a useful safety guardrail?

Replies from: weibac
comment by Milan W (weibac) · 2025-03-06T23:35:08.505Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Maybe for a while.
Consider, though, that correct reasoning tends towards finding truth.

Replies from: sergey-kharagorgiev
comment by Sergii (sergey-kharagorgiev) · 2025-03-08T09:51:16.444Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In abstract sense, yes. But for me in practice finding truth means doing a check in wikipedia. It's super easy to mislead humans, so should be as easy with AI.