I’m far from the first to think of this. Several people — perhaps inspired by creepy Black Mirror episodes — have tried to fine-tune an LLM on their SMS or WhatsApp history in an effort to create a simulation of themselves.
It's a much older concept than Black Mirror. Ever since Markov chain IRC bots got popularized in the late 90s and early 2000s, people have been trying to train their virtual doppelgängers. I'm sure it won't be long before you can pay to have a post-Mortem ghost of yourself duplicated in a cemetery seance style MMO to perpetually live on and interact with other people who have passed on.
On the casino I used to run, I started a pilot program with a homemade poker bot (labeled as such, and only deployed on poker tables labeled as "bot friendly"). The bot had no set model of its own. It was designed to mimic specific players on the casino, regulars who had played 10,000+ hands and who agreed to have their history cloned, by ingesting their entire hand/betting history and looking for what they had done in similar scenarios as far as hole card value, probability, position, pot odds, table "heat" (a rolling average of over- or under-betting from other players in the previous hands based on what they showed if they showed down), etc.
I got a few good players to agree to let me take all their data and make poker clones of them. What was really funny was watching them get baffled and often beaten in heads-up play against their doppelgangers. The bot never had more information about the game than any other player. But its betting style varied wildly depending on who it was based on.
As a side, this also helped me build a real-time system to monitor potential collusion based on betting patterns that deviated from a player's normal behavior at times when they were sitting at the same table as someone else whose patterns deviated in their presence.
I do, and I don't mind showing you them if you're interested, but why do you care?
ah fuckit. SO yeah, I lived outside the US and ran a bitcoin casino for some years for non-US players, which was blocked to US IP ranges and required IDs to eliminate US customers (even though Bitcoin gambling still wasn't officially illegal at the time). My general idea was to make a casino for smart people who liked puzzles, so to that end I built games that would let people have an even-money chance if they played the game perfectly.
The coolest thing that came out of this was one of my players went on to build an escape room in the Netherlands that used one of my games as a puzzle to solve to get out of the room. Here's some stuff from that casino (it was active from about 2010 to 2013).
I am not named Doug. There was a player named Doug, if I recall correctly, who with his wife became the focus of a collusion investigation which he denied, turning into a major war where he was ultimately banned... don't know if that's what you're referring to, but that's what jumped to my mind.
I was the lone coder and artist for all those games, btw. And the whole platform. As well as running the casino daily and doing all tech and customer support by myself for three years, 24/7 while rolling out updates and new games. And it's not easy to roll out bug fixes when you're dealing with real money and lots of online players arguing in your chat rooms!
My advice to anyone is not to get into that industry, even though you can make any game you want and people love the games and the business model sounds way better on paper than selling your games through an app store... the civilized world has ganged up to make sure you won't succeed, or that if you do you'll either kick all your money back through licensing schemes or else be arrested. It's basically too good to be true and too profitable. You can't make money at it unless you're in the club.
Half of the work of running a gambling site is making sure all your customers are losers. If they are consistently winning (cheating or not) you want to get rid of them. Unless you are purely running a "pool" of some kind (think Betfair).
If your games are transparent and verifiably fair, you don't need to "make sure" that half your customers lose. You just post the payout odds, and have a fat enough wallet to cover the volatility. There is no "work" involved in deciding who wins or loses.
That said: If you're making a book (for sportsbetting) then yes, you are trying to balance the difference rather than predict a winner. That's a totally different thing from running a casino.
In poker, all the players are profitable to the house. I think it's up for debate whether it's good for poker rooms to get rid of winners, but if there was a benefit, it would be an indirect benefit, not a direct one.
It depends how prolific they are. Someone running a winning bot farm is taking more money from the losers than the house would be if the losers kept winning/losing against each other. This assumes that the house wants losers to win alot to stay addicted. If they just get beaten all the time they might quit sooner, they may also run out of money sooner.
A bit like how lottery tickets costing $1 will make you win $1, $2 etc. prizes so you buy another ticket and so increase the revenue (a percentage of which is profit), the same for the house. 2 losers winning money off each other all night means they both lose and gave lots of money to the house. A winner taking the 2 losers money in a fell swoop means a lot less money for the house.
er, every hand played in poker is profitable for the house (except for the ones where all players fold before the flop, prior to which no rake is taken). Bots, etc. don't matter. The only reason to prevent bots and collusion and other forms of mischief is to make your poker room a good place for people to play.
I think the point the poster you're responding to was making is this:
If people lose their money quickly to bots/collusion/cheating (or simply skilled players), they will quickly run out of money. If they play each other, they can play more hands, so more profit for the casino.
To exemplify the two extremes, assuming 10% rake:
Player A has $10, and loses $1 every hand: after 10 hands, he's broke and $1 went to the casino.
Player B and Player C are equally skilled and equally lucky. They keep playing $1 pots, trading back and forth. After twenty hands, both have still have $9 while the casino already earned $2. They could essentially keep going until they have given all their money to the casino.
Well that is how it works. The casino provides the service of collecting players together to form a game, serving a fair platform for them to play on, ingesting and disbursing funds (which is no small matter), and then attempting to prevent them from cheating each other. That is the business model for poker, and it's extremely hard to make it profitable. If you factor in the time it takes to do all those things, as well as managing the software 24/7, it's a wonder anyone bothers to host it at all these days.
[edit] As an individual player, obviously, whether IRL casino or online your goal is to outpace the rake. You factor the rake into your expected losses and find a casino with a low rake (ours was actually 3%) and try to get away as a winner. But of course as a casino owner I love grinders and they're who you want day in and day out.
There's this recent cool SF novel by the Polish (and undertranslated!!!) SF author Jacek Dukaj called 'The Old Axolotl'. In it, people used gaming systems to copy their 'beings' into machines before a planetwide wipeout event of biologic life. The machines, with the human simulacra within them, survive for hundreds of years. What's interesting about the books is that the machines feel human and have all the human emotions, but somewhat foreshadowing LLMs, they cannot learn like humans learn. The robot society is essentially stale, forever, nobody develops. (at least that's my interpretation as to why the robots fail in the book)
“Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...” The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.”
It is a kind of cryogenic technology where the person is “half-alive”. But still I guess the book itself does have magical elements in it such as psychic powers.
See also `Revelation Space` series of sci-fi books by Alastair Reynolds. People are being simulated so their knowledge and wisdom can be tapped after their death.
The documentary with him saving his father's writings and such was one of the saddest things I've seen - that moment has stuck with me for years.
I suppose the people who will be paying for such a service will be the loved ones left behind, not the one's dying. I wonder if the doppelgangers will start to talk to each other in the graveyard in the middle of the night?
Apparently this works by asking questions to someone while they are still alive. Then after the individual has passed, friends and family can ask questions to a video screen which will pick out the response that it feels is the most appropriate and play it. Though I'm sure we're not far off from a service that will do this through deepfake technology
Makes me think of the 2004 movie The Final Cut where people get memory implants that record their entire lives for the purpose of creating a highlight reel of their lives after they're gone
I did a fine tuning and embedding on a large LLM that is based on 50 years of daily journal entries, extensive daily notebooks usually measuring in the hundreds to thousands of words per day, and personal writings across a half-dozen different blogs and websites and various social media feeds. Social media posts and comments (including this one) are also put into my notebooks with a snippet of context about why I posted that.
In my journal and daily notebooks I write out some pretty deep and dark thoughts too. It's about as close to a snapshot of my inner thoughts as you can imagine.
And the LLM digested all of that. It took quite a while.
It has provided some interesting insight into who I am as a person, and also how I see myself.
Having done some of this myself, I’m curious your results on fine tuning vs embeddings. I’ve found the latter much more performant, but perhaps I’m thinking about fine tuning wrong.
I used fine tuning to approximate my style. Which is especially important around my logging style as I tend to break it down in to sections, and it is stream of thought writing, example of what I mean is here: https://www.github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores. In my logging and journals I'll crank out anywhere between a couple of hundred words and a few thousand words per day. I used embedding for adding new knowledge.
I also did a little work in letting it scan through my notebooks (they are OneNote and you can access and search via a Python API) via keyword search because it can point directly to something I've written in the past, and not just rely on model weights.
We need to learn to let go. Chatting with a deceased loved one is basically equivalent to the ressurection stone in Harry Potter. A faint reflection which will drive people to insanity. This is not healthy at all.
This is worrying for me. Imagine if someone, god forbid, is encouraged into suicide because he felt safer because he had 'left something behind'. Or like, wire the llm into his messenger to pretend as if he is still alive...
I feel similarly. It’s emotionally dangerous because obviously we miss our loved ones. And hearing their voice or feeling a simulacrum of talking to them is probably comforting in some way.
But it’s ultimately hollow. And can’t really answer anything new other than what’s sent into the training. Or, perhaps more dangerously, the simulation may hallucinate things that don’t exist and confuse people. (Eg, “I loved your sister more than you.” Or “I once had an affair in Paris”)
I think what’s more tricky is after a breakup, training a bot in the ex’s chat history to simulate your ex and continuing on with “good morning/good night” chitchat. That probably really messes with people but will be chosen over the pain of rejection. I’m not sure how many messages are really needed, but it’s pretty easy to collect a few thousand texts over a short period of time.
> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic!
Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.
> it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.
Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate.
If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation?
Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life.
But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.
Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet?
I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot.
What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind !
I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
> I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular.
I think it will end up just being boring. The sad reality is that no one really wants to talk to us, except for a few who are amazing poets or something.
I think what’s more likely is to train models on all material created and ask useful questions for purposes of probate (“when did you buy the house”) because its faster and cheaper than manual research. Or maybe for family history summaries (“how many cousins lived in Colorado in the 1990s and moved to Iowa?”)
People have a strong need to feel connected to others. Many feel particularly strong about their ancestors, or perhaps more distant family or people that were there in particular moments in life. I can definitely see a possibility that people talking to AI emulations of their grandma/godfather/mentor/etc from time to time (after that person is dead). It will of course depend on how culture evolves, maybe it has little place in a hyperinvidualistic world view.
At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.
In the Smallville TV show, the Jor-El AI was shown to have its own agenda, which at times was very much at odds with not-yet-Superman's goals and view points.
Yeah but clark never met his father it was meant to for information transfer. He was not using it as a crutch to avoid dealing with the mental health aspects of his fathers death.
Also as others have pointed out it suffers from the hollywood positive-ification of things and never attmempts to take on any serious aspects of the tech. Its just a plot device.
We can speculate that this was not a mainstream thing in Kryptonian society. Then again, their society was on the verge of collapse when the Els committed the heresy of conceiving a "general purpose" child in a society where bloodlines were bred for particular roles in society. Creating a life-like AI resemblance subject to the same restrictions as Jor-El himself seems almost "normal" in comparison.
Yours might be a western view point in most Asian cultures even many African cultures they view death and ancestors differently than the way people do in the west. So such a service might get quite popular
I had a loved one die and I had a few saved voicemails. I would listen to them a few times a month for years and years. I only stopped because a particular phone upgrade lost them.
I don’t know if it was healthy, but I did it and I liked it when I did. It made me sad to do it, but I continued.
Unless there is an acupuncture powered smartphone and an astrology powered orbital telecommunications network I am unfamiliar with, the only similarity between them and technology is in the minds of the users, not the stuff itself.
What we get out of these gadgets is addiction to peering into them for answers and filling an existential hole like astrology. Meanwhile tomorrow will go by just the same as yesterday.
Technology isn’t altering physics, it’s operates within the boundaries set by experiment a century ago.
It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever.
Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking. The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane.
If designer drugs that implanted experience made line go up that’s the technology we have. But what we do have makes line go up; why bother with other ideas?
Social zeitgeist is to see consumer tech as allowing us to experience and achieve magical things as with astrology, yet daily life is still right there too. We’re addicted to juicing our own biochemistry with video games because drugs are bad mmmk
> Technology isn’t altering physics, it’s operates within the boundaries set by experiment a century ago.
Technology is doing things that many people a century ago thought was impossible, in some cases practically, and in other cases even theoretically.
For example, that the chips inside your phone have features significantly smaller than the wavelengths of light used to etch them, which are also in the size range where some of the people involved in the development were sure that quantum mechanical effects would lead to so many electrons tunnelling through insulators as to prohibit reliable logic gates.
Also above liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors, from what I've heard there is no known complete model of that class of superconductors as BCS theory (developed from 1948 to 1957, getting a Nobel Prize in 1972) doesn't explain anything over 30 K… but most people only interact with those superconductors in the form of YouTube videos about them, not even physical toys.
My dad, back when he was alive, gave anecdotes about how much and fast computers changed things over his career. He was born in 1939, and for him "storing all of Shakespeare on a ball bearing" and "have as many digits of pi as you want" were remarkable; and a long-distance phone call meant from Hampshire (in the UK) to Sussex (a county which shares a border with Hampshire), not international, and local phone numbers being typically four digits (although at least one relative just had ten buttons on their phone and each one would call a specific named person, and anything else you'd need the operator). TV (if you could afford it) was black and white (as were the newspapers), and nobody could record anything (though by my time he had managed to pick the third horse of the two-horse race in home taping, as he had a Video 2000 system instead of VHS or Betamax).
He missed the discovery of liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors, and didn't understand public-key encryption (which would've been useful given he worked on IFF systems for Plessey/GEC Marconi).
Radar existed a century ago (under a different name), but magnetrons didn't and RF electronics were terrible. The magnetrons went on to enable microwave ovens.
Nukes didn't exist until he was nearly 6, and the first thermonuclear weapon was detonated just after he turned 13. Artificial satellites were sci-fi until he was 18, and manned spaceflight was sci-fi until he was 21. There are no analogies to these things in the world of astrology or acupuncture.
> It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever.
Apart from all the diseases we've cured. I finally visited the Mary Rose museum over the holidays, you know what those sailors' bones showed? Rickets, scurvy, broken bones that weren't set right and healed wrong.
Know what else we've done? There are half as many people in abject poverty today than there were a century ago, despite the population going up about 3.5-fold since 1920. "Tech" isn't just your phone and your video games, it's the M-PESA pseudo-banking system letting people use an old Nokia-1100 instead of cash[0].
It's the expansion of rights for women, and more education for everyone, where the pressure came from organisation and coordination which itself was enabled by communication technology.
It's likewise the reporting of My Lai that forced introspection in the USA.
It's thermal remote sensing[1] both in satellites (giving us better weather forecasts and warnings of forest fires) and personal devices (making it cheaper to find where houses need more insulation); it's the microcontrollers in medical devices giving people cybernetic implants for supporting patients with diabetes and for pacemakers, it's the neuroprosthetics in the form of cochlear implants and epilepsy management devices; it's the MRI, CT, and ultrasound scanners; it's the DNA tests, the IVF treatments, the hormonal contraceptives and hormonal supplements for menopause.
And one of the core issues of the human condition is communication: long-distance any-time communication (which is the point of a mobile phone) has gone from a sci-fi fantasy in 1924 to such cheap ubiquity that even in the poorest communities their absence is considered noteworthy.
And then you have things like Google Translate. I'm still surprising and delighting people by showing them a feature first demonstrated over a decade ago — augmented reality live visual translation (although back in 2010 Word Lens was from a separate company, but Google bought them). No more gullible westerners getting "外国变态" as a tattoo thinking it says "asian beauty".
> Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking.
Airplanes? No, and you sound historically (and economically) uninformed for even suggesting that. One of the other places I went in this holiday period was Bristol, where I saw the plinth from which locals have recently toppled and dragged away an unwanted statue commemorating the local philanthropy of a historical slave trader[2]. Planes are about the dumbest possible way to attempt this in the modern world, precisely because of ID requirements on basically all airports.
> The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane.
Also no, but that's less nuts than saying airplanes enable large scale human trafficking, there's billions of us and it is normal for people to be very bad with balancing the scale of big numbers.
Yeah I have a BSc in math, MSc in physics. Am familiar with the variety of technologies that exist due to understanding those topics.
It must feel very empowering to construct those sentences. Lindy effect is ticking on all of it and humanity. Despite those accomplishments, we’re not going to break physics; humanity will cease to exist.
We’ve burned up a lot of our own runway via resource consumption on consumer shovelgear/wear. Put the toxic positivity spin on it all you want, there is no moat when we use up Earth diddling our good feels, changing nothing but the speed at which we exhaust ourselves.
Fingers crossed the decline in obligation to preserve religious memes breaks us free from social stagnation and normalization (though the olds are trying to perpetuate through economic memes) and allow us to live organically, devalue things we get bored with, as our brains seem to do organically:
Industrial controls that stabilize logistics are one kind of technology. Online thought policing via social media and the gadgets that provide it are huge wastes. Titillating to the olds, but banal and normalized to the kids.
Could probably be just as dangerous as helpful. You work through some issues, maybe want to forgive or be forgiven to get closure and the LLM says f*k you, no.
Also something like this happens in the Greg Egan book Zendegi. It starts off with a anecdote about someone ripping their music files and the issues that arise from the copy (or something along those lines). But definitely an interesting read and one that tackles the possible issues that could arise in a different way than other novels.
You can already do this without LLMs: give someone else all of your loved one's writing samples and ask them to do their best to text you in a style as if it was the loved one.
I'm not a professional in the field, but I really don't see how something like this could be therapeutic. Isn't the goal to help people let go and move on with their lives? To me this seems like the exact opposite.
> The LLM would generate conversations that seemed to be surreal parodies of my life. My work colleagues would endlessly reschedule meetings earlier and later; my partner and I would relentlessly debate our lunch options.
Why keep humans around at all? With only a little extra data and training effort it should be possible to create an entire internet of immortal bots living out shiny self-actualising Apple-perfect virtual lives, while the surviving hairless monkeys live out their short, pointless, ugly, imperfect existence slaving away in the lithium mines.
This repo, albeit "old" in regards to how much progress there's been in LLMs, has great simple tutorials right there eg. fine-tuning GPT2 with Shakespeare: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT
From "Bicycle Repairman", by Bruce Sterling (1996) (This is a spoiler, BTW!):
"The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary.... It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speech-writing, and giving it power of attorney and such.... And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the Senator."
Oh, and just note that this was way before Black Mirror.
This is similar to the origin story of Replika. The founding team were devastated by the death of their friend and wanted to immortalize him by using a language model.
People keep mentioning science fiction that this type of thing has been done in. Quick reminder since no one actually watched Caprica that this is how the Cylons started. Daughter of a dude who made a digital scanning technology to create VR avatars makes it better and her avatar becomes sentient. She dies as a suicide bomber and dude discovers the avatar and tries to bring his daughter back by building it a body. It becomes the first Cylon and humanity is extinguished from that particular solar system. The second Cylon turns out to be Admiral Adama's older sister who was also killed in the same suicide bombing.
In any case, it's worth remembering that in reality people are more than what they write, speak, and otherwise ever put into language to communicate to or record for others. I imagine this particular tactic would not work well for me since I have sent single digit SMS messages in the past year and presumably nowhere near six figures as a lifetime number. You'd have to find some other source of writing, but I don't know what that would be. I'd guess at least 90% of the comments I even compose for Hacker News end up being deleted without ever posting them. Turning what I make public into a copy of me would give you a heavily censored, curated image of a fake person who is far more coherent and kind than the real me, and he would also seem to know everything since he's very good at web search. Really, I am quite surprised even reading old forum posts of mine from 20 years ago that I manage to track down, in part because of how much my personality and opinions have changed since then, but also at the impressive way I was able to digest and spew so much basically correct as far as I can tell information into coherent arguments even though I don't think I understood very much of it and remember even less.
I'd expect most Hacker News posters to buy into the obvious truism that what you see on Instagram is not real people but that is equally true of text. Doing this kind of thing at-large risks creating simulacra of perfectly curated uber-humans that would make real people supremely inadequate. We're already going through a mental health crisis exacerbated by people feeling they can't live up to social media personas.
I remember having a similar idea near the end of high school. So 2006ish. I spent a lot of time online, on forums and instant messaging friends I knew in real life and just online. I saved all of my conversations because I thought it would be useful later on in life if I wanted to write a biography, read conversations like a diary, or analyze it with a computer program and create a chatbot. I saved text messages and emails because of this idea too. I don't have any of that data anymore. Lost most of it between 2010 and 2013.
I have a better idea... Have something like Google lens (remember these?) or another embedded camera record all your human interactions. Then we run audio to text on the voice and clip or other scene descriptions on the video(and ocr on text typed/read) and we fine tune a model on it. Imagine if you had 5+ years of such data (of someone that interacts with people a lot).
Although "brain-links" are even more of a cool sci-fi idea. Imagine we can reliably "hook up" at synapse level. We first record everything for a year, then we plug a LLM into it so you can essentially "think together". Eventually you increase the size of the LLM as your wetware brain becomes unusable due to old age. Finally the biological brain dies, only the LLM remains (of comparable parameter size). Are you still alive, or is this a simulation?
Of course I'm taking huge liberty in calling such AI a LLM. LLLm work on the basis of tokens and do not learn beyond their training phase, also one would need some input/output too. But imagine if this was figured out? Then you could live on as long as you can afford the power/maintenance bill for that datacenter that runs your mind :-)
It's probably sufficient to just interact as much as you can and save your data. It's going to get "uploaded" to a LLM eventually. I saved about 17 years worth of my messages.
Looking at my messages I think I don't need to train the model to generate that text, but rather identify the personality traits and emotional stance of the author, and be aware of personal facts. So probably something like RLHF would work better than SFT.
Assuming I have such a model I can further collect preference data to align it to my personality. Over time it might get good enough and I can officially bless it, if it ever gets to that level.
Getting our social account providers to export all our data without restrictions might become a new right we have to have. I know some of them are locking up since 2023 (reddit and twitter).
Setup a local IMAP server (for example Dovecot), have Outlook connect to it (I think you have to use Old-Outlook if on a Mac, not sure) and copy all your Outlook messages to it.
This post motivated me to do the same thing on my imessage data. I used GPT-3.5 for fine-tuning (and haha GPT-4 to help me build it :D). I guess, I should run fine-tuning jobs to create instances of my correspondence partners? Since, for the first system prompt I tell the model to pretend to be me, but on other fine-tuning attempts I can reverse the input and output, and then tell the model to "pretend" to be my counterparty?
I'm still running my first fine-tuning job but I'd definitely love any technical tips people want to drop!!
This is a lot more risky than doing it on a self-hosted model surely? Do you really want to upload your entire message history to a third party (i.e. not Apple)?
I tried this myself using GPT-2J and nearly 15 years of IRC logs trimmed down to only contexts that include me. Each training item would be my message and the preceding 20 messages. Still ended up being an 80 MB log file of over 1M lines.
The results were...not good at all. I ran an IRC bot that would watch the channel, and any time someone sent a message, it would send the last 20 messages to the trained model to see what it would predict the next message to be. It generated mostly garbage. Generated chat messages were on-topic, but non-sensical. It's like the AI was like "uh-huh...yeah...I know some of these words!" and spat something incoherent that seemed related.
At some point, I'll probably try again with a far better model. Likely once I do my next system overhaul so I can do it locally. The only thing I'm not sure of is how to properly train and generate. GPT3 and its predecessors are very much simple text-completion AIs, whereas it seems all the models today are designed for a conversation back-and-forth between the AI and a user.
My guess is you'd better use your message + a bunch of other messages with RLHF, yours being the positive one and the others negative. If you don't have other messages, just generate some. You can also do some supervised fine tuning to have the model memorize your facts.
When I read your comment I trained my own mental model on your words. How is that any different? When a human reads words they apply a sophisticated theory of mind to contextualize the writing and the mental state of the author. If anything, LLM fine tuning is far less invasive than having a person read your writing.
The idea that reading a piece of text constitutes copyright infringement is ridiculous. Copyright isn’t some infectious thing. Reading copyrighted text doesn’t give the copyright holder a claim to the future creative work of the reader.
You want to restrict model training, I get it. The debate is still ongoing, but I’m confident when these “copyright” claims work their way through court the AI companies will come out on top.
> The idea that reading a piece of text constitutes copyright infringement is ridiculous.
No man, it's not ridiculous. If I write a program that copies someone's book and try to sell it I'm infringing on that copyright. I cannot sell a zipped version of the Harry Potter books. I feel like there's so many people weighing in on this discussion who haven't actually done any real world copyright related stuff.
You're going to have to let a lot of scientists know that, because they're still publishing papers with that understanding. I guess they should have consulted you first.
> It's like the AI was like "uh-huh...yeah...I know some of these words!" and spat something incoherent that seemed related.
An accurate depiction of what's going on!
I had terrible results with GPT2 but the newer models are much better. I recommend fine tuning mistral (I had better results than any llama based model)
I've got an RTX 3080, i9-9900K, and 32 GB of RAM right now. I eventually plan on upgrading to an RTX 5090 when those come out, as well as i9-15900K (Or whatever they're gonna call it) and 128 GB of RAM once the next Intel CPU comes out.
My understanding is that even with an RTX 5090 (Assuming 32 GB of VRAM, nothing has been announced yet), if I use fp32, I still won't have enough GPU memory to do inference on a 7B model, let alone training. Though if I quantize down to fp16, I could do inference, but still not training.
My naive intuition is that you'd want to train on the highest precision you have the horsepower for, and then after training, you might be able to get away with quantizing to a lower precision for inference.
I would also expect that fp32 might be overkill, but that anything less than fp16 would start to show a noticeable loss in quality, especially in training. I can't imagine int8 being good at all.
And I would think training with int5 would produce garbage. I didn't even know int5 was an option.
Do you have any published benchmarks comparing the quality of results between the different precisions, going all the way down to int5?
You are broadly better off running a larger, more quantized model, than a smaller model at a higher precision. A 65b parameter model with 2bit quantization still outperforms an fp16 30b parameter model in perplexity and qualitative testing. No one I know does fp32, there's no benefit.
People train LoRAs at low precision regularly. The folks on /r/localllama are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done on consumer hardware, and the boundaries are further out than you'd think.
Also, if you want to really blow-up your intuition, check out model merges...
It's a much older concept than Black Mirror. Ever since Markov chain IRC bots got popularized in the late 90s and early 2000s, people have been trying to train their virtual doppelgängers. I'm sure it won't be long before you can pay to have a post-Mortem ghost of yourself duplicated in a cemetery seance style MMO to perpetually live on and interact with other people who have passed on.