Luc

I remember reading something about LLMs not being able to learn “x is y” equivalence relations. Can’t find it now but limitations like this are what make differences clear between what humans do and what we’ve managed to teach the neural network (which will be used to iterate and improve the model further, of course)

In the Chinese box analogy, this would be like them knowing cats are considered cute but not whether considered-cute animals include cats (if I remember the limitation type correctly). If you happen to slip the right instructions/questions, something they’ve seen before or something they’re capable of extrapolating, then nothing seems off; but if someone can say in one paragraph that cats are cute but they know of no cute animal, you’d not think they’re understanding what they’re saying, and so don’t really understand the language even if they give you plausible words in all other cases

(For cats it’ll work because there’s a billion example sentences out there. LLM vendors are also trying to sidestep such problems by having it generate a bunch of tangential text (in which it might happen to regurgitate the tokens it needs to piece together the answer) before answering the prompt, but that’s still not being able to apply logic)

You can’t ask a compulsive liar for the truth

LLMs have no concept of lying, being truthful, or being correct or wrong, even if they exhibit behavior that seems that way and generate words that say as much. Explaining this isn’t trivial, but I think it should be self-evident when considering that there are situations in which asking someone/something about themself/itself doesn’t give you the full story. One could play pretend or exhibit misleading behavior

Regardless of any browser, consider that there’s probably a half dozen background programs using the internet connection as well. You’ll want to install something like a firewall that you can turn on that blocks all connections except from some allowlisted apps you currently want to use. A simple message check from a handful of installed messengers can occupy that connection for a few seconds while you’re trying to load something that’s much more important to you right now in the browser

(that^ was my situation this morning on ~12kbps 2G network, trying to load my ~4KB grocery list webapp in the grocery store with bad reception… ended up connecting to the store WiFi and sold my soul with a checkbox ^^')

Add in a weather app updating, system update check, some app trying to download a new version, the keyboard sending telemetry or downloading new words, the OS trying to load a “generate 204” page to detect whether there is connectivity, the GNSS subsystem loading SUPL data for positioning, Google submitting its WiFi scan data to either obtain a location or improve their service, calendar sync…