LLM error rates

I worked on LLMs, and now I got opinions. Today, let’s talk about when LLMs make mistakes.

On AI Slop

You’ve already heard of LLM mistakes, because you’ve seen them in the news. For instance, some lawyers submitted bogus legal briefs–no, I mean those other lawyers–no the other ones.  Scholarly articles have been spotted with clear chatGPT conversation markers. And Google recommended putting glue on Pizza. People have started calling this “AI Slop”, although maybe the term refers more to image generation rather than text? This blog post is focused exclusively on text generation, and mostly for non-creative uses.

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Link Roundup: July 2024

In the past month, I wrote an article for The Asexual Agenda discussing causality.  And on a more personal front, I composed a couple short songs for music box.  (Did you know, I made an EP back in 2022?)  Anyways, onwards with the roundup.

Seeing Beyond the Veil | Bullet Points Monthly – This article discusses the association of psychosis and spiritualism, through the lens of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (a game I have little familiarity with).  In the first game, the protagonist’s psychosis is a source of suffering; in the second game, it’s a source of spiritual power.  This serves a narrative of empowerment–but it takes place in a world where giants and fairies exist.  In the real world, people may have more complicated feelings about attempts to turn their suffering into something mystically useful.

‘Cis by Default’, ‘Cis-genderless’, and ‘Gender detachment’: Three Terms You’ll Hopefully Be Hearing More Of | Ace Film Reviews – Blue Ice-Tea discusses three independently created concepts, each describing experiences of people who are not necessarily trans or non-binary, but lack a strong sense of identity.  I think by the nature of the thing, people with these experiences may not be very vocal about it, and may not even think much about it.  Creating labels for the experience has the disadvantage of drawing unwanted attention to the question of who is or isn’t.  But I do think it’s worth being aware of this side of gender experience, and at least some people may find the words useful.

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Origami: Ixora

Ixora

Ixora, designed by Meenakshi Mukerji

I’m saddened to hear that Meenakshi Mukerji recently died.  I almost had an opportunity to meet her at a convention, but there was a pandemic and it never happened.  I’d give her a lot of credit for getting me into modular origami, and many of my earliest models were from her books.  I love her work.  This is a simple model that I have folded many times; it can be found in Ornamental Origami.

Environmental impact of LLMs

A reader asked: what is the environmental impact of large language models (LLMs)? So I read some articles on the subject, and made comparisons to other technologies, such as video games and video streaming. My conclusion is that the environmental footprint is large enough that we shouldn’t ignore it, but I think people are overreacting.

Pricing

I’m not an expert in assessing environmental impact, but I’ve had a bit of experience assessing computational prices for LLMs. Pricing might be a good proxy for carbon footprint, because it doesn’t just represent energy costs, but also the costs of building and operating a data center. My guess is that across many different kinds of computation tasks, the carbon footprint per dollar spent is roughly similar. And in my experience, LLMs are far from the most significant computational cost in a typical tech company.

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I worked on LLMs

Generative AI sure is the talk of the town these days. Controversial, is it not? It’s with some trepidation that I disclose that I spent the last 6 months becoming an expert in large language models (LLMs). Earlier this year when I moseyed through the foundational LLM paper, that was where it began.

I’d like to start talking about this more, because I’ve been frustrated with the public conversation. Among both anti-AI folks as well as AI enthusiasts, people have weird, impossible expectations from LLMs, while being ignorant of other capabilities. I’d like to provide a reality check, so that readers can be more informed as they argue about it.

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Link Roundup: June 2024

Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music | Fayra Faraji (video, 1:36 hours) – This video explains how orientalist music has virtually nothing to do with actual music from the Middle East.  The music uses a hodgepodge of different instruments and musical styles that come from vastly different contexts.  They nearly exclusively use the double-harmonic and phrygian mode, not because those are particularly common in Middle-Eastern music, but rather because it’s uncommon in other western music and yet fits within the 12TET system.

As a fan of xenharmonic/microtonal music, I know that many non-western music traditions use different tuning systems–the Maqam traditions are particularly notable.  I appreciate such music as it comes into my awareness, and definitely wish it were more widely distributed.  That said, I’m very aware that I come from a western musical tradition, and the very first thing I hear in microtonal music is a sense of uniqueness relative to my musical context and training.  When I think about non-Western musical traditions, I imagine a whole history and culture where these musical characteristics are just normal, just a medium used to express something else entirely.  That just isn’t my perspective, I cannot hear it that way.

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Origami: Box Head

Box Head

Box Head, designed by Boice

This iconic model is one that we folded at the East Bay Origami Convention back in March.  It takes inspiration from Boice’s Head Empty model, which is a person in a coat and tie, with a cube for a head.  Taking that same idea to the extreme, now we have a little doll with a giant cube for a head.  It’s pretty hard to get a photo of the thing, because from any view from above, the giant head eclipses the rest of the body.  If you could see it from above, you would see that the cube is open on the top and in the back.

Boice has a video tutorial.  It’s easier than it looks, but you may want to start with large paper.  I think it’s a good introduction to the box pleating method.

The tricky part was getting it to stand up.  I chose the fold the feet a bit differently from the instructions, giving it giant duck feet.