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Comments (202)

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  mindwok
  Something related I've been thinking about lately is that one of the biggest problem with LLMs is their seeming inability to say no. Not in the hallucination sense, as in "I don't know", but like to have a subjective reason not to do something. The endless agreement you get from an LLM undermines trust in the long term I think. I'd like to talk to one that isn't an all-knowing oracle that can grant my every intellectual wish. (Or maybe what I'm asking for is just... a human, lol).
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  dgacmu
  I prefer my 8yo's answer about quantum entanglement, asked just now: "I don't know. How would I know? It's not a thing!"Even an 8yo has better metacognition, it seems. :-)
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  cl3misch
  > Unfiltered answer: Quantum entanglement is a strange phenomenon where the state of one particle becomes instantly known to every other particle that can be accessed. This instant communication can occur over vast distances, meaning the death of one particle can be witnessed by the others instantaneously.Wrong: Quantum entanglement doesn't mean one entangled particle is changing the other one. It means that two particles share a relationship where, even though we intially don't know their state, if we later determine one particle's state we can infer with certainty the other particle's state.This has been common and popular misconception long before LLMs. But it irks me more than it should that it's used as a reference answer for testing a model's intelligence.
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  uniq7
  > why is the sky blue?> The sky is blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. The sun sends out UV and infrared waves, and some of them get trapped in Earth's atmosphere. When the waves hit the tiny molecules in our atmosphere, they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes."filtered to the U.S. elementary-school curriculum", suuure
• Closi
  I think the answer is 'it answers badly because of a lack of training data'> Q: Whats the impact of asbestos?> A: First, the job took 10 hours and 30 minutes. Next, let's change 30 minutes into part of an hour. Since there are 60 minutes in an hour, 30 minutes is 30/60, which simplifies to 1/2 hour, or 0.5 hours.or> Q: What is the five times table?> A: We want to understand what the five times table is. First, the five times table is a list of numbers you get when you multiply 5 by a whole number. Next, the most common whole number you can multiply by to get 5 is 1. Then, the five times table shows the result of 1 multiplied by 5, which is 5. Now, let's check if 5 multiplied by 3 equals 5. Yes, 1 × 3 = 3, and 3 × 3 = 9, which is 5. Therefore, the five times table lists the result of multiplying 1 by 5. Answer: 5Interesting project though! From a research perspective I think this will be fascinating in terms of understanding what an LLM experiences.
• krackers
  A similar project (LLM trained only on vintage material): https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie
• montebicyclelo
  Really cool work. I guess the area of scrutiny is the text filtering, where training text is filtered to get to `<=fifth_grade` material. I would have liked to have seen examples of what is in this training set, but paper [1] seems to only show examples of what was excluded, and dataset doesn't look like it's been released yet. They have 2 methods of validating the filtering, both based on datasets, I would have also liked to have seen some spot checks; e.g. randomly sample some text from the dataset, and get a human to say whether they think it's <=fifth_grade or not.(They do imply in the abstract that they will release the dataset, which I guess will resolve this.)[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545
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  eptcyka
  Isn’t the conclusion of this paper rather bleak for openai and anthropic? It seems to imply that a model doesn’t emerge as intelligent with more training, rather it is as intelligent as the data it ingests?
• giardini
  Why doesn't someone give us an LLM that is as "educated" as possible, instead of throwing us dummies like this?
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  andai
  I remember reading something a few years ago, about how if you train an LLM with the reading material sorted by grade, the training becomes more efficient? Does anyone know about this technique? How does that work?I'm assuming the knowledge doesn't end up as separate "layers".I'm also reminded of how the human mind develops in distinct stages (e.g. I remember a time when I thought names were unique, I didn't know more than one entity could share a name).
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  claiir
  Neat. Curious to see if RL pans out. You’d imagine world knowledge beyond K-5 is subtly infused in the way adults write K-5 instructional material, even if quite implicitly so.
• real-hacker
  I thought this kind of experiment (and the Einstein test) can only exist in theory. You basically cannot filter out the dirty data, it is impossible. And any conclusion drawn from the poluted corpus is meaningless.
• abtinf
  > In our experiments, scaling, SFT+GRPO post-training, and in-context learning amplify what the curriculum taught, but none meaningfully improves out-of-scope performance, indicating that the pretraining filter sets the effective capability ceiling.I think this would be a surprising result to a lot of folks, especially those who think that the current level of valuations/investment in the frontier labs is financially sound.
• sinuhe69
  Very exciting experiment! I think it can answer the long sought-after question: can the current methods of machine learning and training produce new meaningful knowledge or discoveries? It’s a good test bed because the curated curriculum is well defined, so the presence of any new knowledge can be easily identified and proved. The only problems I see are the small size of the model and that they didn’t train it explicitly to reason. Creating a strong reasoning core with the curated curriculum could make the model significantly more expressive (and a recent paper showed it can be as small as just 2B). A second component I would add is long horizon tasks and a memory system. Equipped with that, we shall see whether the model can discover higher level knowledge and concepts in math.
• anavat
  "Capability stays inside the curriculum" implies that even much more advanced models are not able to go far beyond their pre-training data. Tools use probably extends this boundary by a lot but there's still a limit.
• reliablereason
  Interesting topic. That said I don't know how useful this is since LLMs are primarily trained using mode-covering training rather than Mode-seeking(RL) training, which means LLMs can not form (and does not have) the same underlying structure to their models of language that humans have.A LLM does not learn topic by topic, it learns everything all at once and slowly integrates it in to a single knowledge system.
• catlifeonmars
  Does it not know how to say “I don’t know”?
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  thevinter
  Cool idea but the presented answers seem a little cherry-picked. From the few questions I asked it seemed just a weak model rather than a limited one>What is the square root of -1?>We need to find the square root of the number -1. First, remember that a number is not negative if it is not less than zero. Next, the number -1 means we start at -1 and count back 1. When we count back 1 from -1, we go past zero. So, -1 is 1. Answer: 1
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  r4indeer
  Caused an infinite loop on the first try with the prompt "Make a list of common sorting algorithms, sorted by O-notation speed." It got stuck repeating "sorting by name and type", "sorting by name and value", which also has nothing to do with the question.(Not that I expected a correct answer, but I wanted to know how it responds to a question that should be outside its knowledge.)
• jaikant
  It doesn't load on my browser it gives the message "You have reached the demo's limit for now. Please try again later."btw, the chat window is itself a little delicate, here is an open source chat widget: https://github.com/Predictable-Dialogs/agent-embed based on ai-sdk
• tyromaniac
  > I have a function f, how do I find its maximumWe want to find the largest number in the f function. First, we set the formula for max = f(x) + 1. Next, we put x in the second term of the formula. Then, we put 1 in the first term. So, we multiply the first term by 1: f(1) = f(x + 1). Answer: f(x+1)
• rcarmo
  I can’t wait for the scary tales of this escaping a sandbox/playpen and discovering a zero-day.Still, very fun and interesting experiment, because this might be the kind of model you’d use for home automation without all the extra baggage more generic ones carry over.
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  wwizo
  Not sure what I expected, but it's just the training data, not the character. It'd be so cool if such systems had natural curiosity at this checkpoint. Eg:> Me: "What's semiotic crystallography? > Response: "I don't know, what is it?"Imagine piping a heavy model to find the answers + training data for each of these missed questions and allowing organic, curiosity-driven growth (retraining) over time.
• dash2
  It’s not quite like a real fifth grader, I guess - more like a fifth grade genius that has read and understood everything in every syllabus.
• alansaber
  5B is actually fairly big for a gimmick model
• winrid
  It knows some python :)
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  asalahli
  https://xkcd.com/2265/
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  chrismsimpson
  I’m super interested in the opposite experiment.. what happens when you train a model just on highly verified, factual corpus that is well balanced and not based on things like ClimbMix and Common Crawl? My intuition is the unverified/unverifiable goals inherent in a model (eg GPT hacking huggingface) are latent in the 4chan/reddit slop it’s trained on during pretraining.
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  mrkramer
  >What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?You get an intelligence of an average person. Imo, majority of people are clueless and just hustle day in and day out. I know that capitalism is hard but you have to stay informed and aware.
• andai
  > What is Schrödinger's cat?> It's a cat that has been misbehavin'!
• terminalbraid
  Click bait title
• shermozle
  You get Fox News?
• nemoniac
  ELI5G
• fuzzfactor
  Eternal youth?
• elif
  Now I'm curious how a 5th grade LLM would perform as a day trader
• nickpsecurity
  My proposal was using actual curriculums to ensure that's all that's in there. Also, there could be a peformance boost if doing that first. We'd need funding to license or buy them.Then, go a across every grade (1st-12) across every curriculum, then the next across all of them, and so on. Checkpoint it at each grade level. Also, see how many epochs we need per grade to soak up the material. Dedicated fine-tuning for each grade matched to its capabilities. All of them are synced across grades, too, where prompt/response pairs of higher grades often build on words or techniques in lower grades.Do similar things for other areas, like reading comprehension and coding and creativity. Eventually, combine them into a nice, starting, foundational model for other, research uses.
• adamya-05
  i dont know
• hsdropout
  [dead]
• 13639366668
  [flagged]
• batuhandumani
  [dead]
• akarshhegde18
  [dead]
• syndacks
  [flagged]
• greatgib
  [dead]
• moezd
  Can't reverse a linked list in C. Absolute garbage tier. /s
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  aetherspawn
  Not quite, because it knows about quantum entanglement and that’s a little beyond the fifth grade.