Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

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Mildly interesting anecdote: when the Cyphral Distich solution popped up a few days ago, I spent about an hour with ChatGPT trying to solve it myself without looking at the proposed solution. ChatGPT opened by saying “the solution is disputed online,” and made the dispute sound fairly convincing, which struck me as odd because things like this are usually either clearly solved or clearly not.

After I gave up (mostly because ChatGPT had given me incomplete information needed to solve it) I checked the source of the dispute. It was a site very similar to this one and someone had an AI agent working on the same problem, publishing dozens or hundreds of pages of notes. The agent found the solution page and concluded it was wrong because many of the 32 source passages supposedly didn’t contain enough text.

I dug up the PDF of the book and found the mistake - whenever a passage continued onto the next page, the agent wasn’t including that continuation. The passages weren’t actually too short.

Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.

Great story!

Verifying sources is a recursive problem - where do you stop? Humans have intuitive feel for it, but agents don’t or at least not yet (I wonder if intuition is just a secondary neural net which is currently being added to the agents as we speak).

Also as a human you are able to examine agents erroneous trajectory, real or imaginary, without contaminating your own. Agent have a problem with that - as soon as someone else’s thought is in the context it can lose track of provenance and veracity. Sometimes I think we need a bloom filter to retroactively assign “dirty” flag to invalidated or questionable token spans already in the context.

Even before AI I strongly believed the internet was eventually going to have to move to a web of trust model. I think World ID (formerly Worldcoin) can be a really cool part of the solution to this, though people widely criticize it without fully understanding it and make assumptions that are wrong. But I agree that trust and verification is increasingly a large problem and one of the best ways to combat that is to actually choose unique identities to trust.

> I wonder if intuition is just a secondary neural net which is currently being added to the agents as we speak

Arguably, intuition is primary neural net, the only thing an LLM has without CoT, it just is spiky so humans only notice where it's below-average and just dismiss the rest as normal. Of course it's going to lag behind in some areas compared to others.

I think this is what obstacles on the path to AGI look like now. It’s random things that would be obvious to a human but are unrepresentative in how an AI views the world and therefore it suddenly becomes seemingly incapable, despite having basically superpowers for proximal work.

I don’t mean that to say AGI is here or easy or necessarily that close but it’s likely going to feel like one thing after another until one day most of these things that make you think “how could something so capable be that dumb” are largely solved.

Yes, and right now it seems we get around this problem by spawning 10k agents (that's what OpenAI did for the stokes problem) and hoping that at least one of the 10k catches this and does it right - which it very likely will.

> Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.

It can’t make it past the abstract, in some cases - just like most people!

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