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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Humans can do lossy or lossless. There are plenty of people who can recite entire Bible or Koran flawlessly.

This is more the equivalent of asking humans to create an exact copy of the text, typesetting and all, including the publishing information, page numbers, and exact linebreaks. Not just recite the text, which would be a lossy encoding of the original.

Humans are terrible at lossless encoding of information, it's what we invented machines for =D

No it is not more like that. This isn't compressing images, just the sequence of characters (or words). It is literally EXACTLY the same task as just memorizing word for word (plus punctuation), which humans are very good at, probably because our brains use a lot of strategies akin to what is used in this challenge.

How do you know it's compressed? Someone who can recite one of these probably knows interpretations, back stories, related information that help them memorize it. The "storage" required to the recital may be larger than the text itself, it we can even think in those terms.

And there are humans that can jump 8ft in the air. Doesn't mean it's correct to say that "humans can jump 8ft in the air." Very few people are regurgitating verbatim information.

Many can recite the Koran flawlessly, its short and heavily encouraged in education through rote repetition.

Much, much fewer can recite the bible, its many times longer.

LLMs can also recite the bible and Koran flawlessly, given how frequent the text appears in their training material.

> LLMs can also recite the bible

Is this something you've seen demonstrated? I have no doubt they would be able to recite a lot of sections of it, but there are many sections that are less often quoted, and its a long frickin book. If its just a hunch you have I might give it a go and compare if thats okay I think it would be interesting to interpret what given LLM knows and might miss

Now you've given me the idea of coaxing new bible verses out of an LLM. Maybe we can even get one to confabulate a complete additional book! =)

That’s a strong assertion! Are there prompts that cause llms to regurgitate the bible to demonstrate this?

I’m thinking that the pigeon hole principle says that the current models are orders of magnitude too small to do this.

That's true, but it seems unlikely that that's a particularly important part of intelligence. The vast majority of people do _not_ do that type of memorization, are they still intelligent?

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