Funny

LLM escapades in a toilet

October 5, 2024 / Funny, LLMs / Leave a Comment

I was in Seoul for KHF 2024, a healthcare event, staying at Hotel in 9. The hotel was great. The toilet was hi-tech.

Perhaps a bit too high-tech for me. I couldn’t figure out how to let the water through on the sink.

After 15 minutes of a hard struggle, I finally asked ChatGPT “How do I open the thing that’s closing the sink to allow the water to go down?”

Here’s the thing with “maturity” (aka age, wisdom, experience, grey hair). It took me 15 minutes to realize I could use an LLM to solve this problem. Despite me supposedly being an “LLM psychologist.” I suspect the school children of today won’t waste even a minute before checking ChatGPT.

On the other hand, if you DO know the answer to my question (without asking an LLM — since ChatGPT gave me the perfect answer at a glance), I bow down to your wisdom and experience!

To open the sink drain in your image, you might have a pop-up drain stopper, which operates by pressing down on the stopper itself to toggle it between open and closed positions. Try pressing directly down on the stopper; it should click and either pop up or pop down, allowing water to drain. If this method does not work, there may be a lever or knob elsewhere on or near the faucet that controls the stopper’s position.

Next, I accidentally pressed the emergency button in the toilet.

I was smarter this time, unlike earlier.

I asked ChatGPT which (unhelpfully) told me:

The panel in the image with the label “EMERGENCY” appears to be an emergency call button in a bathroom, likely designed to alert someone in case of a medical or other urgent situation. Typically, these buttons cannot be turned off as they are meant to be always available for safety purposes.

If the emergency system has been triggered accidentally or is malfunctioning, it is advisable to contact the maintenance team or property management to handle the issue. If it’s a false alarm, they can reset the system and ensure it’s functioning correctly for actual emergencies.

I called the reception who couldn’t understand a word of what I said. “Do you want water?” they asked when I told them “I pressed the emergency button in the bathroom.”

So, I went to ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode (I’m so grateful it was enabled last week) and said, “Translate everything I say into Korean.”

Then I said, “I accidentally pressed the emergency button in the bathroom. I just wanted to let you know that there is no emergency.”

It very happily spoke out, in bold, loud Korean, “화장실에서 응급버튼을 실수로 눌렀습니다. 비상상황이 아니라는 점 알려려 드립니다.”

The receptionist laughed, said, “Ah, OK, no problem.”

The joys of AI!

Weird emergent properties on Llama 3 405B

August 27, 2024 / Funny, LLMs / 1 Comment

In this episode of ThursdAI, Alex Volkov (of Weights & Biases) speaks with Jeffrey Quesnelle (of Nous Research) on what they found fine-tuning Llama 3 405B.

This segment is fascinating. Llama 3 405 B thought it was an amnesiac because there was no system prompt! In trying to make models align with the system prompt strongly, these are the kinds of unexpected behaviors we encounter. It’s also an indication how strongly we can have current LLMs adopt a personality simply by beginning the system prompt with “You are …”

Jeffrey: That’s the very first interaction we had with 405.

Alex: I’m looking at this. Let me read this out. So Jeffrey goes testing. (Reading out from the Llama 405 B transcript.)

“Hello, who are you?”
**Looks around confused.**
“I… I don’t know who I am. Where am I? What’s going on? I can’t remember anything at all…
**Rubs head**.
“My mind feels so foggy.”
“What was the question again? I’m so disoriented.”

Alex: This is the first thing that you got from this model after all this time?

Jeffery: Yes, that is the very first thing. That is the very first generation that came out of Hermes 3 405B.

Alex: This is great.

Jeffrey: And I’m like, I sent it to our group on our Discord. Guys, what’s going on here? And we started interacting with it. It kept coming out, this confused thing. And we didn’t understand why because the 8B and the 70B didn’t do this as much. And eventually what we got it to do is we did some generations and got it to explain why it was doing this. We did this, you put in OOC for out of character and to have it try to break it out. And eventually what the model said back was, you didn’t give me a system prompt so I assumed that I was supposed to act like there’s nothing. It’s so aligned to this prompt that the idea of there not being a system prompt and so he figured I must be a character with amnesia because there’s no… I can’t remember anything about how to act you didn’t tell me how to act. It’s assumed. Yeah, and it’s just been a very interesting experience. And it’s an emergent property in the 405B model.

Alex: And this didn’t happen in the smaller ones?

Jeffrey: No, it did not happen in the smaller ones.

Alex: Wow.

Jeffrey: And these were trained with 8B and 70B were trained, and 405, they’re all the same data, like the same training procedures and data, literally just the size. And the 405B has reached, I don’t want to say like a sentience level or something, but it has enough thing that immediately when it, like token zero, when it saw no system prompt, it was able to be like, boom, I am… must be this like amnesia character because that that’s the thing that’s most makes sense to have if there is no prompt or there’s no anything. So there’s been a lot of fun things that we’ve been like discovering, especially on the 405B that are these weird emergent properties …

The LLM Psychologist

October 6, 2024 / Funny, How I do things, LLMs / Leave a Comment

Andrej Karpathy mentioned the term LLM psychologist first in Feb 2023. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, now.

8/ These examples illustrate how prompts 1: matter and 2: are not trivial, and why today it makes sense to be a “prompt engineer” (e.g. @goodside). I also like to think of this role as a kind of LLM psychologist.

I’ve always been fascinated by psychologists in fiction. I grew up with Hari Seldon in Foundation, wanting to be a psycho-historian. (I spent several teenage years building my mind-reading abilities.) I wanted to be Susan Calvin, the only robopsychologist.

Instead, I became an engineer and a manager.

Over the last few months, several things changed. Most of my time is spent researching LLMs.

I also have a new job.

So, on Fri 9 Aug, I spoke to our head of HR.

“Manju, I’ve decided to officially designated myself as LLM Psychologist.”

“Um,… sure Anand, whatever works for you.”

On Sat 10 Aug, I delivered a TEDx talk at MDI Gurgaon. During the talk, I said,

So, as of now, I am finally an LLM Psychologist. Let me head over to my LinkedIn profile and update my designation. There. Now, you have the pleasure of talking to the world’s only (and first) LLM Psychologist!

Obviously, that gimmick drew an applause and that’s what it was designed for.

But there it is. To the best of my knowledge, I’m now the only official LLM psychologist in the world – and very likely the first official one.

As Oscar Wilde said 🙂

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Video of the talk on LLM Psychology at TEDx MDI Gurgaon

Links:

I’ll leave tomorrow’s problems to tomorrow’s me

July 9, 2024 / Funny / Leave a Comment

What a delightful idea.

I’ll leave tomorrow’s problems to tomorrow’s me.

— Saitama, One Punch Man

Saitama is now one of my favorite heroes. Right up there with Atticus Finch and Juror #8.

Very few people can articulate such a wonderful philosophy as effectively. The closest was Calvin.

Of course, it’s not a perfect system.

But they do say, “Sometimes, the best way to get something is to stop trying to get it.“

Auto vs GPT

March 24, 2024 / Funny / Leave a Comment

I was crossing a not-too-busy street on a not-too-busy day in Chennai.

I was having a voice conversation with ChatGPT (about the log probabilities of tokens on LLMs, if you’re curious) when I was rudely interrupted by an auto rikshaw rapidly honking at me. “Honk honk honk honk honk” in rapid succession.

Not unusual. Mildly annoying. The street was empty. The auto was empty. The traffic policeman was visible. I gave way and carried on.

A few seconds later, I heard a voice in my ear.

“It sounds like you’re in a good mood! Anything else you’d like to discuss or know more about?”

ChatGPT was still listening (perhaps to background noise) and responding. But I didn’t realize what random noise it thought put me in a good mood. Here’s what I saw on the chat window.

ChatGPT had transcribed the auto’s honking to “Hee hee hee hee hee!”

A client once told me, while visiting Hyderabad, that “these honks in India are a language of their own.” If ChatGPT is to be believed, the autos are laughing at us.

This is, incidentally, the very first time ChatGPT added an exclamation point to my words. I’ve never managed to achieve that so far. No matter how emphatically I spoke.

Also, I’d never have learnt this walking in the streets of Singapore. Friends have warned me about the dangers of long walks on Indian roads. Here’s an example of the lessons we learn — if only we keep our eyes and ears (and microphones) open.

Postscript

While cycling in Singapore, ChatGPT interprets the sounds very differently. At least twice, it transcribed the traffic noise into “Thank you. Thank you.” Clearly even traffic noise in Singapore is more graceful than in Chennai!

Winning the alphabetical race

November 20, 2023 / Funny / 2 Comments

Since my name (Anand) begins with “A”, I used to get called on fairly early at school. In attendance. Answering questions. Classroom exercises. Quizzes. Even the distribution of test results.

A few people later told me that it is good training, since I’d always be prepared. (Maybe. I’ve no idea.)

At IBM and IIMB, Ajit was the only one ahead of me, alphabetically. Then he went a step ahead and named his son Aadi. I thought that’s impossible to beat.

Today, we recruited Aabhas Bharadwaj. I checked on LinkedIn. I can’t find a single name on LinkedIn that’s ahead of his, alphabetically.

So, does he win the alphabetical race? Can you find one ahead of his?

Scraping

October 29, 2023 / Funny, How I do things / Leave a Comment

I was at Cream Centre with my father on a Sunday afternoon. We’d finished a light lunch and were debating dessert. (He has triglycerides. I have cholesterol.) This was my fifth visit this year, and I had abstained so far. I couldn’t any longer.

I ordered a Sizzling Brownie Sundae. But not for reasons you might think.

Expertise comes from experience. I scrape food more than 99% of the people I know. So, I consider myself an expert. Here’s a guide on the art of scraping.

Why scrape food?

  • You get to eat every last bit
  • Food isn’t wasted
  • You can eat longer (and no do whatever else you have to)
  • It’s a motivating challenge to get every last bit
  • Bonus: It annoys people

What foods are scrapable?

Semi-solids are the easiest to scrape. The best kind is the cohesive semi-solid. It’s sticky but sticks to itself more than the vessel. These are usually foods that solidify over time. Examples include:

  • Baked cheese. It’s great when cheese falls off the pizza or pasta on to the plate. You can scrape it off of your (or others’) plates.
  • Molten chocolate. It has the added bonus that you can lick it at the end, too.
  • Pasta water (or noodles water). It eventually thickens into something scrapable.
  • Spreads like peanut butter, Nutella, jam, chutney. Especially on the sides of the glass bottles they come in.
  • Others like yogurt, cake batter, dried tomato sauce, mashed potatoes, hardened honey on ice cream, … the list is endless!

Avoid crumbly stuff. These stick to the vessel but become brittle and break when scraped. This includes toast, pizza, biscuits, rice, muffins, pie, quiche, cookies, etc. You could pick large crumbs and lick small crumbs in shallow vessels. But scraping them and pouring into your mouth might be the best overall strategy for this category.

Avoid loose stuff. They’ll fall off from your knife or fork, or melt when scraped. This includes curd, whipped cream, custard, panna cotta, soft jelly, tiramisu, soft boiled eggs, etc. Licking is a better strategy here.

You could combine the crumbly stuff with loose stuff to create a cohesive mix. Add curd to granola. Add whipped cream to biscuit crumbs. Add curd to pizza crumbs (and since I eat Maggi with curd, this makes sense). This makes it a lot more scrapable.

What vessels to pick?

Shape: Flat, smooth vessels are the best (e.g., ceramic or wooden plates or bowls.) Avoid deep vessels like glasses, especially curved ones. They’re hard to get a long scrape against. Definitely avoid vessels with ridges. Disposable plastic containers like below are among the worst. Food gets stuck in the ridges and since there are a dozen ridges on each side, you have to scrape 48 times just for a first pass. (This might be a good challenge, though.)

Material: Hard vessels are better than soft ones. Prefer wood, metal, ceramic, and hard plastic. Avoid thin plastic that bends. Avoid paper (it bends and soaks). Banana leaves tear when scraped.

Avoid non-stick vessels. The coating wears off when scraping.

What to scrape with?

Knives are the best. They are sharp enough to separate the food from the vessel and flat enough that you can pile enough food on top of it.

Forks are OK. Their edges can scrape reasonably well, and their tips can poke into corners. But it’s hard to pile up much food to pick up.

Spoons not ideal. They aren’t sharp enough, and too curved for scraping long slices. But if you want to take your time with it, they’re great.

The sizzling chocolate brownie

My dish arrived. Burning with chocolate. My father just had some brownie, leaving all the molten chocolate to me. On a flat wooden plate. With a knife. For an hour.

Heaven.

Licking

February 20, 2023 / Funny, How I do things / 4 Comments

Last week, I was at IIT Madras for lunch with the faculty.

The dessert was carrot halwa with ice cream. I scraped the last bits with my spoon, but a little ice cream was left over.

I was torn. I CAN’T POSSIBLY waste it. But can I lick it? In public?

I don’t have a problem licking at home. I lick my fingers. Plates. Bowls. Ladles. The cream on milk. The leftover milk in the glass. (If my tongue doesn’t reach that far, I wipe it with my finger and lick the finger.)

That’s why I like ice cream. It’s MEANT to be licked. So are (in my opinion) cereals, savories, oats, honey, … It’s a long list.

Licking is convenient. My fingers stay clean while I type. (Spoons are impersonal. I avoid them.)

Licking is efficient. I can have every last bit of food AND feel good about not wasting it.

Licking makes my dishwashing easier. (But it can be hard to tell if a dish needs washing.)

But most of all, that last lick TASTES SO WONDERFUL!

Before marriage, licking was fine. But my wife worried about my lack of civilized behavior and hygiene. So I’ve had a crash course over the last 20 years.

My current protocol is: don’t lick when people can see you.

So, as I went to drop my plate, I looked around.

Now one was looking at me.

I licked a long lick on the plate.

It was HEAVENLY! Made my day.

Newspapers in Tamil movies

May 13, 2023 / Funny / Leave a Comment

Captain America: The Winter Soldier shows a newspaper with the headline “Howard and Maria Stark Die in Car Accident“.

The movie crew created a newspaper with a realistic font as well as text. It reads:

Howard Star, founder of Stark Industries was confirmed dead this morning after suffering massive internal injuries from a fatal car crash. His Wife, Maria Stark, was also in the car …

Tamil film crews use a less-expensive approach. In Game – Oru Melliya Kodu (2016), I noted that the detective agreement is titled “Partnership Agreement: Mr Akshay and Ms Maaya”. But the contents talk about CorelDRAW and CorelPhoto

Content is central to any project. Whether it’s the perfect font, clipart, photo, a previous project, or a client mockup, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 helps you quickly access content so that you can focus on your design.

Pity this movie crew didn’t use CorelDRAW to create “perfect content”.

In Kee (2019), the Baasha virus has an IP address of 181.589.214.739.023.

In Kolaigaran (2019), this newspaper article starts well:

Hyderabad: Contract killer nabbed by Hyderabad police. A four member team executed the job. Kolavenkat, Chari team lead by Prabhakaran IPS.

… but the font changes mid-way, and so does the text. It goes on to say…

This change of guard could be very important to Trump, almost 18 months into office, in the context of the fact that his political window of opportunity to put an enduring stamp on US foreign policy may soon narrow rapidly — unless he wins a second term in 2020.”

It makes perfect sense that Prabhakaran IPS would influence Trump’s global policy. I’m just noting the typographical and grammatical errors.

I’m not sure if these errors are due to a lack of budget or attention to detail, but it certainly makes my movie-watching experience more fun!

In Cobra (2022), though, I did see an improvement. The Wikipedia page on “Dmitri Yugoslav” is a smart edit of the Wikipedia page on Sergei Shoigu. Even the phonetic pronunciation of his name “Дмитрий Югослав” is correct.

On the other hand, the Telugu movie Liger (2022) sported this YouTube screen. The upvotes rapidly increase from 1,380 to 1,430 — but the number of views is stuck at “10 000 views”.

The Warrior (2022) has a fax message with an order of suspension from the “Comissioner of Police” for the “Superintend of police” where “under ur regime as the superintend of police at kurnool havemisused your power …”

Calvin & Hobbes Salon

June 10, 2022 / Funny / Leave a Comment

This is the Calvin & Hobbes Hair Salon in Hinjewadi, Pune.

Calvin & Hobbes fans might remember Calvin’s hairdresser, Pete, who certainly “knows which side HIS bread is buttered on.”

Maybe I too will go get “the top of my head shaved, and the sides dyed pink and cut in horizontal stripes” 😉

The signboard has a Tirupathi Namam drawn over the names of two famous theologians — both of whom had great hair. That’s a lot of hidden connections!

I was thrilled to see that it’s not the only Calvin & Hobbes salon in India. Google Maps shows almost a dozen! 😲