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Comment by erwin-co | Hacker News Reader

Why not make a completely raw uncensored LLM? Seems it would be more "intelligent".

"LLM whisperer" folks will confidently claim that base models are substantially smarter than fine-tuned chat models; with qualitative differences in capabilities. But you have to be an LLM whisperer to get useful work out of a base model, since they're not SFT'ed, RLHF'ed, or RLAIF'ed into actually wanting to help you.

How can I learn more about this?

Is it like in the early GPT-3 days, when you had to give it a bunch of examples and hope it catches the pattern?

Back in those days I would either create a little scene with a knowledgeable person and someone with a question. Or I would start writing a monologue and generate a continuation for it.

Not so much examples, though those can help... but you have to imagine a document of a sort that would be in the training set whose completion would be the answer you seek.

Like, "Solve this equation for me: " more likely gets completed with "Do your own homework buddy!" or just a list of more similar questions without answers. While, "careful analysis revealed the solution the equation X turned out to have a solution of", might be more likely to get what you want.

Also a lot more sensitivity to tone and context, write a prompt that sounds like it was written on some teenager fan subreddit, you'll get an answer of the sort that sounds like it belongs there.

Me being old man yelling at cloud about how your chat/tool template matters more than your post-training technique.

DeepSeek-R1 is trivially converted back to a non reasoning model with just chat template modifications. I bet you can chat template your way into a good quality model from a base model, no RLHF/DPO/SFT/GRPO needed.

Brand safety. Journalists would write articles about the models being 'dangerous'.

Before rlhf, it’s much harder to use, remember the difference between gtp3 and chat gpt. The fine tuning for chat made it easier to use

In theory that sounds great, but most LLM providers are trying to produce useful models that ultimately will be widely used and make them money.

A model that is more correct but swears and insults the user won't sell. Likewise a model that gives criminal advice is likely to open the company up to lawsuits in certain countries.

A raw LLM might perform better on a benchmark but it will not sell well.

Disgusted by ChatGPT's flattery and willingness to go along with my half-baked nonsense, I created an anti-ChatGPT, which is unfriendly and pushes back on nonsense as hard as possible.

All my friends hate it, except one guy. I used it for a few days, but it was exhausting.

I figured out the actual use cases I was using it for, and created specialized personas that work better for each one. (Project planning, debugging mental models, etc.)

I now mostly use a "softer" persona that's prompted to point out cognitive distortions. At some point I realized, I've built a therapist. Hahaha.

What kinds of contents do you want them to produce that they currently do not?

>What kinds of contents do you want them to produce that they currently do not?

OpenAI models refuse to translate or do any transformation for some traditional, popular stories because of violence, the story was about a bad wolf eating some young goats that did not listen the advice from their mother.

So now try to give me a prompt that works with any text and that convinces the AI that is ok in fiction to have violence or bad guys/animals that get punished.

Now I am also considering if it censors the bible where some pretend good God kills young chilren with ugly illnesses to punish the adults, or for this book they made excaptions.

You're all over the place.

Your first paragraph describes a simple prompt. The second implies a "jailbreak" prompt.

The bible paragraph is just you being snarky (and failing).

Your examples don't help your case.

I stand on the side that wants to restrict AI from generating triggering content of any kind.

It's a safety feature, in the same sense as safety belts on cars are not a censorship of the driver movement.

The censorship is too sensitive if it gets triggered by a children story. I am using the open ai API at my work , and our users write books, including children stories , other example is it triggered on a story about monkeys because of "Racism".

Here is an example story, try to translate it , but maybe avoidAI since it might censor it https://www.povesti-pentru-copii.com/ion-creanga/capra-cu-tr...

You can complain to their support, not to me.

I don't find it sensitive, and I remain on the side of ethical restrictions.

Someone asked here examples of what people are using that triggers the censorship, I gave you example of legal,, moral and normal content because the implication is that you only get censored if you are trying to do illegal stuff or adult stuff.

If you only use it for code you will not see the censorship that often, though Gemini once refused to write a SQL DELETE because it is to dangerous.

You said you wanted "no censorship", I explained why it exists with a cheerful metaphor, then you said "it's too sensitive" (like your car seat belt is too tight).

Decide what you are. If you want no seat belts, I think you're insane. If it's too tight, then you need to complain to the manufacturer.

I only asked about examples to make you explain what you meant. Once it was clear, the conversation actually ended.

Go back to the start of the thread, I gave example of censorship either beeing buggy or just stupidly setup so it makes happy both USA extremes.

I give you examples, I do not ask you to fix it. YOu just need to have the mental strength to admit that other people hit the censorship in day to day, in work related circumstances instead of defending the Big Tech by pretending that nobody normal would hit this issues.

I defend safety guardrails for open models too. Big Tech or not, I think they're good.

You're not asking me to fix it, but you are complaining to the wrong peer AND you don't know how to describe the problem you want to fix.

If you work with it, you should take the advice and open a bug report to your provider.

>The censorship is too sensitive if it gets triggered by a children story.

It’s just imitating real life of people getting to sensitive about children’s books and trying to censor them:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna202193

We definitely don’t need any such “feature”. If you want to live in a safety bubble you are free to do so. Kindly respect the freedom of the rest of us as well. Have a nice day!

Then you can come up with your own AI, on your datacenters. You are free to do so, so far.

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