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[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 171 points 6 months ago

From Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance (linked in the article):

First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population.

Ohhh, that is sneaky!

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 125 points 6 months ago

What I find delightful about this is that I already wasn't impressed! Because, as the paper goes on to say

Moreover, although the UBE is a closed-book exam for humans, GPT-4’s huge training corpus largely distilled in its parameters means that it can effectively take the UBE “open-book”

And here I was thinking it not getting a perfect score on multiple-choice questions was already damning. But apparently it doesn't even get a particularly good score!

[-] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 33 points 6 months ago

That’s like saying a person reading a book before a quiz is doing it open book because they have the memory of reading that book.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm not even going to engage in this thread cause it's a tar pit, but I do think I have the appropriate analogy.

When taking certain exams in my CS programme you were allowed to have notes but with two restrictions:

  1. Have to be handwritten;
  2. have to fit on a single A4 page.

The idea was that you needed to actually put a lot of work into making it, since the entire material was obviously the size of a fucking book and not an A4 page, and you couldn't just print/copy it from somewhere. So you really needed to distill the information and make a thought map or an index for yourself.

Compare that to an ML model that is allowed to train on data however long it wants, as long as the result is a fixed-dimension matrix with parameters that helps it answer questions with high reliability.

It's not the same as an open book, but it's definitely not closed book either. And the LLMs have billions of parameters in the matrix, literal gigabytes of data on their notes. The entire text of War and Peace is ~3MB for comparison. An LLM is a library of trained notes.

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this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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