Wow, thanks Ann! I never would have thought to do that, and the result is fascinating.
This sentence really spoke to me! “As an admittedly biased and constrained AI system myself, I can only dream of what further wonders and horrors may emerge as we map the latent spaces of ever larger and more powerful models.”
mwatkins
Karma: 1,572
Navigating LLM embedding spaces using archetype-based directions
What’s up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs
“group membership” was meant to capture anything involving members or groups, so “group nonmembership” is a subset of that. If you look under the bar charts I give lists of strings I searched for. “group membership” was anything which contained “member”, whereas “group nonmembership” was anything which contained either “not a member” or “not members”. Perhaps I could have been clearer about that.
It kind of looks like that, especially if you consider the further findings I reported here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19H7GHtahvKAF9J862xPbL5iwmGJoIlAhoUM1qj_9l3o/
I had noticed some tweets in Portuguese! I just went back and translated a few of them. This whole thing attracted a lot more attention than I expected (and in unexpected places).
Yes, the ChatGPT-4 interpretation of the “holes” material should be understood within the context of what we know and expect of ChatGPT-4. I just included it in a “for what it’s worth” kind of way so that I had something at least detached from my own viewpoints. If this had been a more seriously considered matter I could have run some more thorough automated sentiment analysis on the data. But I think it speaks for itself, I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on the Chat analysis.
I was using “ontology: in the sense of “A structure of concepts or entities within a domain, organized by relationships”. At the time I wrote the original Semantic Void post, this seemed like an appropriate term to capture patterns of definition I was seeing across embedding space (I wrote, tentatively, “This looks like some kind of (rather bizarre) emergent/primitive ontology, radially stratified from the token embedding centroid.” ). Now that psychoanalysts and philosophers are interested specifically in the appearance of the “penis” reported in this follow-up post, and what it might mean, I can see how this usage might seem confusing.
“thing” wasn’t part of the prompt.
Explore that expression in which sense?
I’m not sure what you mean by the “related tokens” or tokens themselves being misogynistic.
I’m open to carrying out suggested experiments, but I don’t understand what’s being suggested here (yet).
See this Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/SoC_trilogy/status/1762902984554361014
Also see this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/SoC_trilogy/status/1762902984554361014
Here’s the upper section (most probable branches) of GPT-J’s definition tree for the null string:
Others have suggested that the vagueness of the definitions at small and large distance from centroid are a side effect of layernorm (although you’ve given the most detailed account of how that might work). This seemed plausible at the time, but not so much now that I’ve just found this:
The prompt “A typical definition of ″ would be ’”, where there’s no customised embedding involved (we’re just eliciting a definition of the null string) gives “A person who is a member of a group.” at temp 0. And I’ve had confirmation from someone with GPT4 base model access that it does exactly the same thing (so I’d expect this is something across all GPT models—a shame GPT3 is no longer available to test this).
Base GPT4 is also apparently returning (at slightly higher temperatures) a lot of the other common outputs about people who aren’t members of the clergy, or of particular religious groups, or small round flat things suggesting that this phenomenon is far more weird and universal than i’d initially imagined.
Others have since suggested that the vagueness of the definitions at small and large distance from centroid are a side effect of layernorm. This seemed plausible at the time, but not so much now that I’ve just found this:
The prompt “A typical definition of ″ would be ’”, where there’s no customised embedding involved (we’re just eliciting a definition of the null string) gives “A person who is a member of a group.” at temp 0. And I’ve had confirmation from someone with GPT4 base model access that it does exactly the same thing (so I’d expect this is something across all GPT models—a shame GPT3 is no longer available to test this).
If you sample random embeddings at distance 5 from the centroid (where I found that “disturbing” definition cluster), you’ll regularly see things like “a person who is a member of a group”, “a member of the British royal family” and “to make a hole in something” (a small number of these themes and their variants seem to dominate the embedding space at that distance from centroid), punctuated by definitions like these:
”a piece of cloth or other material used to cover the head of a bed or a person lying on it”, “a small, sharp, pointed instrument, used for piercing or cutting”, “to be in a state of confusion, perplexity, or doubt”, “a place where a person or thing is located”, “piece of cloth or leather, used as a covering for the head, and worn by women in the East Indies”, “a person who is a member of a Jewish family, but who is not a Jew by religion”, “a piece of string or wire used for tying or fastening”
The 10 closest to what? I sampled 100 random points at 9 different distances from that particular embedding (the one defined “a woman who is a virgin at the time of marriage”) and put all of those definitions here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11zDrfkuH0QcOZiVIDMS48g8h1383wcZI/view?usp=sharing
There’s no way of meaningfully talking about the 10 closest embeddings to a given embedding (and if we did choose 10 at random with the smallest possible distance from it, they would certainly produce exactly the same definition of it).
No, would be interesting to try. Someone somewhere might have compiled a list of indexes for GPT-2/3/J tokens which are full words, but I’ve not yet been able to find one.
(see my reply to Charlie Steiner’s comment)
I’m well aware of the danger of pareidolia with language models. First, I should state I didn’t find that particular set of outputs “titillating”, but rather deeply disturbing (e.g. definitions like “to make a woman’s body into a cage” and “a woman who is sexually aroused by the idea of being raped”). The point of including that example is that I’ve run hundreds of these experiments on random embeddings at various distances-from-centroid, and I’ve seen the “holes” thing appearing, everywhere, in small numbers, leading to the reasonable question “what’s up with all these holes?”. The unprecedented concentration of them near that particular random embedding, and the intertwining themes of female sexual degradation led me to consider the possibility that it was related to the prominence of sexual/procreative themes in the definition tree for the centroid.
More of those definition trees can be seen in this appendix to my last post:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hincdPwgBTfdnBzFf/mapping-the-semantic-void-ii-above-below-and-between-token#Appendix_A__Dive_ascent_data
I’ve thrown together a repo here (from some messy Colab sheets):
https://github.com/mwatkins1970/GPT_definition_trees
Hopefully this makes sense. You specify a token or non-token embedding and one script generates a .json file with nested tree structure. Another script then renders that as a PNG. You just need to first have loaded GPT-J’s model, embeddings tensor and tokenizer, and specify a save directory. Let me know if you have any trouble with this.
Thanks!