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323 points steerlabs | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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keiferski ◴[] No.46192154[source]
The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is how they never seem to understand "the flow" of an actual conversation between humans. When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning.

LLMs don't do this. Instead, every question is immediately responded to with extreme confidence with a paragraph or more of text. I know you can minimize this by configuring the settings on your account, but to me it just highlights how it's not operating in a way remotely similar to the human-human one I mentioned above. I constantly find myself saying, "No, I meant [concept] in this way, not that way," and then getting annoyed at the robot because it's masquerading as a human.

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1. herf ◴[] No.46193063[source]
Training data is quite literally weighted this way - long responses on Reddit have lots of tokens, and brief responses don't get counted nearly as much.

The same goes for "rules" - you train an LLM with trillions of tokens and try to regulate its behavior with thousands. If you think of a person in high school, grading and feedback is a much higher percentage of the training.

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2. 9rx ◴[] No.46193218[source]
Not to mention that Reddit users seek "confident idiots". Look at where the thoughtful questions that you'd expect to hear in a human social setting end up (hint: Downvoted until they disappear). Users on Reddit don't want to have to answer questions. They want to read the long responses that they can then nitpick. LLMs have no doubt picked up on that in the way they are trained.