Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

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> just base64 encode your prompts and see how the LLMs respond

This is done via translations, LLM are good at translations, being able to translate doesn't mean you understand the subject.

And no I am not wrong here, I've tested this before, for example if you ask if a CPU model is faster than a GPU model it will say the GPU model is faster, even if the CPU is much more modern and faster overall since it learned that GPU names are faster than CPU names it didn't really understood what faster meant there. Exactly what the LLM gets wrong depends on the LLM of course, and the larger it is the more fine grained these things are but in general it doesn't really have much that can be called understanding.

If you don't understand how to break the LLM like this then you don't really understand what the LLM is capable of, so it is something everyone who uses LLM should know.

That doesn't mean anything. Asking "which is faster" is fact retrieval, which LLMs are bad at unless they've been trained on those specific facts. This is why hallucinations are so prevalent: LLMs learn rules better than they learn facts.

Regardless of how the base64 processing is done (which is really not something you can speculate much on, unless you've specifically researched it -- have you?), my point is that it does degrade the output significantly while still processing things within a reasonable model of the world. Doing this is a rather reliable way of detaching the ability to speak from the ability to reason.

Asking characteristics about the result cause performance to drop because it's essentially asking the model to model itself implicitly/explicitly.

Also the more "factoids" / clauses needed to answer accurately are inversely proportional to the "correctness" of the final answer (on average, when prompt-fuzzed).

This is all because the more complicated/entropic the prompt/expected answer, the less total/accumulative attention has been spent on it.

  >What is the second character of the result of the prompt "What is the name of the president of the U.S. during the most fatal terror attack on U.S. soil?"

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