Hacker News Reader

Comment by svnt | Hacker News Reader

I’ve also noticed Gemini and Claude occasionally mixing terms recently (eg revel vs reveal) and can’t decide whether it is due to cost optimization effects or some attempt to seem more human.

I can’t recall either using a wrong word prior this month for some time.

View on HN

Or just because mistakes are part of the distribution that it's trained on? Usually the averaging effect of LLMs and top-k selection provides some pressure against this, but occasionally some mistake like this might rise up in probability just enough to make the cutoff and get hit by chance.

I wouldn't really ascribe it to any "attempt to seem more human" when "nondeterministic machine trained on lots of dirty data" is right there.

Sure, but if that were the case why has it gotten worse recently? I would expect it to be as a result of cost optimization or tradeoffs in the model. I suppose it could be an indicator of the exhaustion of high quality training data or model architecture limitation. But this specific example, revel vs reveal, is almost like going back to GPT-2 reddit errors.

I also don’t want to pretend there is no incentive for AI to seem more human by including the occasional easily recognized error.

Or just the models are getting bigger and better at representing the long tail of the distribution. Previously errors like this would get averaged away more often; now they are capable of modelling more variation, and so are picking up on more of these kinds of errors.

That makes sense, but what is the solution?

Looking at the account's other comment there are subtle grammatical errors in that one too.

Would be good to see the prompt out of morbid curiosity

Reply on news.ycombinator.com