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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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it really struggles comprehending that words are comprised of individual letters. It's opaque to the alphabet by the nature of what it can see and learn from. I asked it to generate anagrams and it was absolutely hopeless at it. It gave me nonsense like 'overwrite is an anagram of obverse'. When I really coaxed it for an anagram of obverse and observe, it gave me rubbish like 'oversbe' and 'beovers' but recognized they weren't words. It couldn't get verbose, which was really ironic seeing as it was incredibly verbose in its descriptions.

There's a structural and idiosyncratic reason for this, which has to do with how text is processed before it goes in and out of the model. Basically it processes "tokens," which are chunks of words. Training text is "tokenized" before being fed in, and the model itself outputs tokens which are converted back to text before being printed. The specific tokenization scheme that it uses (as far as we know, based on prior iterations of OpenAI's large language models) is "byte-pair encoding," which has itself been optimized so that common words are a single token, and then common chunks of words are tokens, and then (way down the list) individual letters are tokens. BPE is designed to minimize the size of the tokenized training data within a vocabulary of (I think) ~65k possible tokens. So the trained model has no way of knowing that the word "overwrite" starts with the letter 'o', since most likely it sees one token for "over" and another for "write" and the encoding doesn't need to resort to tokens for the individual letters, and it does not know that the "over" token has any special relationship to the "o," "v" etc. tokens. Gwern hypothesizes that BPE encoding is why it also cannot rhyme, and I assume he's right although the specific mechanism for BPE creating that deficiency isn't as clear to me.

Gwern hypothesizes that BPE encoding is why it also cannot rhyme, and I assume he's right although the specific mechanism for BPE creating that deficiency isn't as clear to me.

if [way], [may], and [day] are entirely different tokens (they are in gpt2 at least), it can't learn that they rhyme from their structure (the way we would), only from those specific tokens being used in other rhymes, i think?

Can't rhyme? A poet friend of mine was lamenting that it rhymes too much!

A whisper on air,

A silent thought

That lingers there.

Though none can hear

It still exists,

A hushed connection

Of souls that share.

Glorpth yoozled down the blizbevy tree, His muttazels aflutter with glee. Beside him stood the zibbablock, Gloating and ready with a shock. But the brave Glorpth didn't falter, He battled the beast with a clatter. He thrashed and he slashed 'til the night was done, And the Jabberwock was won.

I specifically asked for three nonsense words for this one...

Through the dark woods I heard a howl,

Flittering through like a silken owl.

The slonky creatures stirred below,

As they rose and began to flow.

Crossing through the gnelpy grove

I saw what I could not move.

It was covered in gloopy scales

And had a thousand hissy tails.

It was the jabberwocky, fierce and wild

Ready to attack with a baleful smile.

I ran and ran and never looked back

The terror of its presence slack.

I guess it can! Maybe it finally has enough training to overcome whatever impediment hobbled previous incarnations' attempts.

Crossing through the gnelpy grove

I saw what I could not move.

That's a shoddy non-rhyme, but if we accept Blake's "eye / symmetry"...

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