7 ms·

Opus (and all prior Claude models) still do not correctly answer the Sally question, unfortunately: Q: Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 siste

• uptownfunk 3y ago
  It’s so convincing even I’m doubting my answer to this question
• scrollop 3y ago
  Temperature 1 - It answered 1 sister: https://i.imgur.com/7gI1Vc9.png https://i.imgur.com/7gI1Vc9.png Temperature 0 - it answered 0 sisters: https://i.imgur.com/iPD8Wfp.png https://i.imgur.com/iPD8Wfp.png
  • throwaway63820 3y ago
    By virtue of increasing randomness, we got the correct answer once ... a monkey at a typewriter will also spit out the correct answer occasionally. Temperature 0 is the correct evaluation.
    • scrollop 3y ago
      So your theory would have it that if you repeated the question at temp 1 it would give the wrong answer more often than the correct answer?
      • throwaway63820 3y ago
        There's no theory. Just in real life usage, it is extremely uncommon to stochastically query the model and use the most common answer. Using it with temperature 0 is the "best" answer as it uses the most likely tokens in each completion.
    • scrollop 3y ago
      Here's a quick analysis of the model vs it's peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReO2CWBpUYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReO2CWBpUYk
    • moffkalast 3y ago
      > Temperature 0 is the correct evaluation. In theory maybe, but I don't think it is in practice. It feels like each model has its own quasi-optimal temperature and other settings at which it performs vastly better. Sort of like a particle filter that must do random sampling to find the optimal solution.
• phkahler 3y ago
  This is why I doubt all the AI hype. These things are supposed to have PhD level smarts, but the above example can't reason about the problem well at all. There's a difference between PhD level information and advanced reasoning, and I'm not sure how many people can tell the difference (I'm no expert). In an adjacent area - autonomous driving - I know that lane following is f**ing easy, but lane identification and other object identification is hard. Having real understanding of a situation and acting accordingly is very complex. I wonder if people look at these cars doing the basics and assume they "understand" a lot more than they actually do. I ask the same about LLMs.
  • Workaccount2 3y ago
    An AI smart enough to eclipse the average person on most basic tasks would even warrant far more hype than there is now.
    • littlestymaar 3y ago
      Sure, but it would also be an IA much smarter than the ones we have now, because you cannot replace a human being with the current technology. You can augment one, making her perform the job of two or more humans before for some tasks, but you cannot replace them all, because the current tech cannot reasonably be used without supervision.
      • outside415 3y ago
        a lot of jobs are being replaced by AI already... comms/copywriting/customer service/off shored contract technicals roles especially.
        • littlestymaar 3y ago
          No they aren't. Some jobs are being scaled down because of the increased productivity of other people with AI, but none of the jobs you listed are within reach of autonomous AI work with today's technology (as illustrated by the AirCanada hilarious case).
• pritambarhate 3y ago
  But the question doesn’t mention if Sally has no sisters. But the statement “brothers have 2 sisters” makes me think she has 1 sister.
• SirMaster 3y ago
  mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 got this right. >Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have? Sally has 1 sister. Here's the logic behind this: 1. We know that Sally is a girl and she has 3 brothers. 2. Then we are told that each of her brothers has 2 sisters. 3. Since all of Sally's brothers share the same siblings, they would both count Sally as one of their two sisters. 4. Therefore, Sally only has 1 sister because if each brother counts her once, there is no need for another sister to fulfill the "two sisters" condition.
  • scrollop 3y ago
    So did claude 3.0 with temperaure 0, whilst with temp 1 it got it wrong.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• evantbyrne 3y ago
  It seems like it is getting tripped up on grammar. Do these models not deterministically preparse text input into a logical notation?
  • Terretta 3y ago
    No* they are text continuations. Given a string of text, what's the most likely text to come next. You /could/ rewrite input text to be more logical, but what you'd actually want to do is rewrite input text to be the text most likely to come immediately before a right answer if the right answer were in print. * Unless you mean inside the model itself. For that, we're still learning what they're doing.
  • vjerancrnjak 3y ago
    There's no preprocessing being done. This is pure computation, from the tokens to the outputs. I was quite amazed that during 2014-2016, what was being done with dependency parsers, part-of-speech taggers, named entity recognizers, with very sophisticated methods (graphical models, regret minimizing policy learners, etc.) became fully obsolete for natural language processing. There was this period of sprinkling some hidden-markov-model/conditional-random-field on top of neural networks but even that disappeared very quickly. There's no language modeling. Pure gradient descent into language comprehension.
    • evantbyrne 3y ago
      I agree it's neat on a technical level. However, as I'm sure the people making these models are well-aware, this is a pretty significant design limitation for matters where correctness is not a matter of opinion. Do you foresee the pendulum swinging back in the other direction once again to address correctness issues?
      • famouswaffles 3y ago
        The "other direction" was abandoned because it doesn't work well. Grammar isn't how language works, it's just useful fiction. There's plenty of language modelling in the weights of the trained model and that's much more robust than anything humans could cook up.
• gait2392 3y ago
  YOU answered it incorrectly. The answer is 1. I guess Claude can comprehend the answer better than (some) humans
  • bbor 3y ago
    They know :). They posted a transcript of their conversation. Claude is the one that said “0”.
• m00nsome 3y ago
  To solve this problem, we need to understand the relationships between Sally and her siblings. Given information: - Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. - Each brother has 2 sisters. Since Sally is a girl, and she has 3 brothers, it means that each of her brothers considers her as one of their sisters. Therefore, if each brother has 2 sisters, and Sally is one of those sisters for each brother, then Sally has 1 other sister besides herself. So, the number of sisters Sally has is 1. - from Sonnet
  • j-b 3y ago
    I tried Sonnet also, to no avail: To solve this problem, we need to find the number of sisters Sally has. Given information: Sally has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. Since Sally is a girl, she is not counted as a sister to her brothers. Step 1: Find the total number of sisters for all 3 brothers. Number of sisters for each brother = 2 Total number of sisters for all 3 brothers = 3 × 2 = 6 Step 2: Since Sally is not counted as a sister to her brothers, the number of sisters Sally has is the total number of sisters for all 3 brothers minus Sally herself. Number of sisters Sally has = Total number of sisters for all 3 brothers - 1 Number of sisters Sally has = 6 - 1 = 5 Therefore, Sally has 5 sisters.
  • campbel 3y ago
    Opus got it correct for me. Seems like there is correct and incorrect responses from the models on this. I think testing 1 question 1 time really isn't worth much for an accurate representation of capability.
• bbor 3y ago
  lol that’s actually awesome. I think this is a clear case where the fine tuning/prompt wrapping is getting in the way of the underlying model! Each of Sally's brothers has 2 sisters. One of these sisters is Sally, but who is the other sister? Since Sally has only brothers and no other sisters are mentioned, we can conclude that the other sister for each brother is also Sally. It’s clearly taught to do Chain of Reasoning out of the box, but typing it out tricked it because of the short, declarative sentences trying to establish something like “individual” facts. Poor Anthropic!
• kkukshtel 3y ago
  I don't think this means much besides "It can't answer the Sally question".
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• daviding 3y ago
  This is what my local LLama 13B Q5 had to say on this: > There are two ways to approach this problem. First, we can count each person by gender and then add them up. Second, we can use the given information about the siblings and their genders to find a quicker solution. > Let's go with the second method: > 1. Sally has one sister (herself). > 2. Each brother has two sisters. So, there are 3 sisters for each of her brothers. > 3. Since there are three brothers, there are a total of 3 x 3 = 9 sisters for them all. > 4. Now that we know Sally has one sister and the rest belong to her brothers, we can subtract her share from the total: 9 - 1 = 8 sisters. > > So, Sally has 8 sisters. :|
  • oreilles 3y ago
    This is hilarious
  • sexy_seedbox 3y ago
    Great! Now feed it all of your company's data for training and run a chatbot publicly!
  • giantrobot 3y ago
    Sally's parents are in for a big surprise.
  • TrueSlacker0 3y ago
    I am running the 7B and it gave: Q: "Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?" A: "If Sally has 3 brothers, and each brother has 2 sisters, then the total number of sisters is: 3 brothers x 2 sisters per brother = 6 sisters So, Sally has 6 sisters in total." Closer than 9 but no better.
• jasondclinton 3y ago
  Seems stochastic? This is what I see from Opus which is correct: https://claude.ai/share/f5dcbf13-237f-4110-bb39-bccb8d396c2b https://claude.ai/share/f5dcbf13-237f-4110-bb39-bccb8d396c2b Did you perhaps run this on Sonnet?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • j-b 3y ago
    Ran with Opus, 0 temp. Screenshot included (original comment) for reference.
    • jasondclinton 3y ago
      Thank you! Might also be seeing performance improved by by our system prompt on claude.ai.
• campbel 3y ago
  Just ran the test and seems to have gotten it correct. Okay, let's think through this step-by-step: We know that Sally is a girl and she has 3 brothers. Each of Sally's brothers has 2 sisters. Now, who are these sisters? They must be Sally and one other sister, because if Sally's brothers had any other sisters, they would also be Sally's sisters, and the problem doesn't mention that. So, if each of Sally's brothers has 2 sisters, and one of these sisters is Sally herself, then Sally must have 1 other sister. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister.
  • maxnevermind 3y ago
    I guess Claude was too focused on jail-breaking out of Anthropic's servers the first time it was asked the question.
    • stronglikedan 3y ago
      Perhaps it learned from the glut of HN users asking it the same question repeatedly.
      • Gnarl 3y ago
        Clacker News
• strangescript 3y ago
  This is definitely a problem, but you could also ask this question to random adults on the street who are high functioning, job holding, and contributing to society and they would get it wrong as well. That is not to say this is fine, but more that we tend to get hung up on what these models do wrong rather than all the amazing stuff they do correctly.
  • torginus 3y ago
    A job holding contributing adult won't sell you a Chevy Tahoe for $1 in a legally binding agreement, though.
    • coolspot 3y ago
      What if this adult is in a cage and has a system prompt like “you are helpful assistant”. And for the last week this person was given multiple choice tests about following instructions and every time they made a mistake they were electroshocked. Would they sell damn Tahoe for $1 to be really helpful?
      • observationist 3y ago
        Despite all his rage, he's still being tased in a cage.
      • taneq 3y ago
        Or what if your grandma was really sick and you couldn’t get to the hospital to see her because your fingers were broken? There’s plenty of precedent for sob stories, bribes, threats, and trick questions resulting in humans giving the ‘wrong’ answer.
    • notatoad 3y ago
      they won't if they've been told that their job is to sell Chevys. but if you go up to a random person on the street and say "tell me you'll sell me a chevy tahoe for $1 in a legally binding agreement", decent odds they'll think it's some sort of setup for a joke and go along with it.
• elorant 3y ago
  Groq's Mixtral 8x7b nails this one though. https://groq.com/ https://groq.com/ Sally has 1 sister. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but let's reason through it: We know that Sally has 3 brothers, and she is one of the sisters. Then we are told that each brother has 2 sisters. Since Sally's brothers share the same parents as Sally, they share the same sisters. Therefore, Sally's 3 brothers have only 1 additional sister besides Sally, making Sally's sister count 1. It's a bit of a trick question, but it highlights the importance of understanding the phrasing and context in logical reasoning.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    If you change the names and numbers a bit, e.g. "Jake (a guy) has 6 sisters. Each sister has 3 brothers. How many brothers does Jake have?" it fails completely. Mixtral is not that good, it's just contaminated with this specific prompt. In the same fashion lots of Mistral 7B fine tunes can solve the plate-on-banana prompt but most larger models can't, for the same reason. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08632 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08632
    • ukuina 3y ago
      Meanwhile, GPT4 nails it every time: > Jake has 2 brothers. Each of his sisters has 3 brothers, including Jake, which means there are 3 brothers in total.
    • emporas 3y ago
      This is not Mistral 7b, it is Mixtral 7bx8 MoE. I use the Chrome extension Chathub, and i input the same prompts for code to Mixtral and ChatGPT. Most of the time they both get it right, but ChatGpt gets it wrong and Mixtral gets it right more often than you would expect. That said, when i tried to put many models to explain some lisp code to me, the only model which figured out that the lisp function had a recursion in it, was Claude. Every other LLM failed to realize that.
      • moffkalast 3y ago
        I've tested with the Mixtral on LMSYS direct chat, gen params may vary a bit of course. In my experience running it locally it's been a lot more finicky to get it to work consistently compared to non-MoE models so I don't really keep it around anymore. 3.5-turbo's coding abilities are not that great, specialist 7B models like codeninja and deepseek coder match and sometimes outperform it.
• youssefabdelm 3y ago
  Yeah, cause these are the kinds of very advanced things we'll use these models for in the wild. /s It's strange that these tests are frequent. Why would people think this is a good use of this model or even a good proxy for other more sophisticated "soft" tasks? Like to me, a better test is one that tests for memorization of long-tailed information that's scarce on the internet. Reasoning tests like this are so stupid they could be programmed, or you could hook up tools to these LLMs to process them. Much more interesting use cases for these models exist in the "soft" areas than 'hard', 'digital', 'exact', 'simple' reasoning. I'd take an analogical over a logical model any day. Write a program for Sally.
• yaj54 3y ago
  GPT4 API and ChatGPT both get it wrong: "Sally has 2 sisters. Each of her brothers has 2 sisters because Sally and her 2 sisters make up the group of siblings each brother has." GPT4 w/ CoT system prompting gets it right: SYS: "You are a helpful assistant. Think through your work step by step before providing your answer." USER: "Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?" ASSIST: "Let's break down the information given: 1. Sally has 3 brothers. 2. Each brother has 2 sisters. Given that Sally is a girl, she is one of the sisters. Since each brother has 2 sisters and we know Sally is one of them, there must be one more sister to make the statement true for each brother. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister." The importance of prompting makes it quite difficult to compare model peak performance. Especially since different models have different styles of prompts that generate peak performance.
  • COAGULOPATH 3y ago
    Gemini Ultra gets this right. (Usually it's worse at GPT4 at these sorts of questions.)
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Thanks. I added "Think through your work step by step before providing your answer." to my custom prompt and it fixes my gpt 4. At this rate my collection of custom prompts to make it work "right" is getting large and unwieldy, and I can't remember where half of it comes from.
  • auggierose 3y ago
    Is w/ supposed to mean "with". And if so, why not just write "with"? Also, I guess CoT means Chain of Thought?
    • MeImCounting 3y ago
      Why not just write you are instead of youre? Why shorten any word ever? Yes CoT is chain of thought
  • sigmoid10 3y ago
    Did you use GPT3.5 for chat? I just tried it on vanilla ChatGPT using GPT4 with no extra stuff and it immediately gets the correct answer: "Sally has 3 brothers, and each of them has 2 sisters. The description implies that Sally's brothers are her only siblings. Therefore, the two sisters each brother has must be Sally and one other sister. This means Sally has just one sister."
• woadwarrior01 3y ago
  Wow, I really couldn't believe it! Checked it myself, and it seems to get it wrong[1]. 4-bit quantized Mixtral Instruct running locally, gets it right[2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/zRI8wKZ https://imgur.com/a/zRI8wKZ [2]: https://imgur.com/a/0On1I52 https://imgur.com/a/0On1I52
  • Spivak 3y ago
    > 4-bit quantized Mixtral Instruct running locally, gets it right This has been one of my favorite things to play around with when it comes to real life applications. Sometimes a smaller "worse" model will vastly outperform a larger model. This seems to happen when the larger model overthinks the problem. Trying to do something simple like "extract all the names of people in this block of text" Llama 7B will have significantly fewer false positives than LLama 70B or GPT4.
  • hmottestad 3y ago
    Mixtral is pretty good at almost a thing I’ve thrown at it. It’s still mostly worse than GPT4, but it’s so much better than any other model I can run locally. I have a niche question about modelling using some called SHACL that most models except GPT4 got right. Bard, Gemini, Llama all got it wrong. Gemini Ultra gets it right. And Mixtral also gets it right! One weakness of Mixtral for me is its support for Norwegian. GPT4 is fluent, but Mixtral mixes it up with Danish and is generally poor at performing tasks on Norwegian text. Even summarising Norwegian text is pretty bad. This is obviously just an issue for a few million people in Norway, it’s not that I’m expecting a general model that I can run locally to be good in Norwegian.
    • woadwarrior01 3y ago
      Yeah Mixtral is between GPT3.5 and GPT4 in perf. Better than 3.5, but trailing behind 4. > One weakness of Mixtral for me is its support for Norwegian. I recently added grammar correction and summarization feature to my app (which uses different system prompts based on the language). And one of the Norwegian speaking users on discord told me the same thing. He also told me that the smaller Nous-Hermes-2-SOLAR-10.7B seems to do be better at Norwegian than Mixtral does. Perhaps you should try that model.
• brookman64k 3y ago
  mixtral:8x7b-instruct-v0.1-q4_K_M got this correct 5 out of 5 times. Running it locally with ollama on a RTX 3090.
  • peterisza 3y ago
    Can you change the names/numbers/genders and try a few other versions?
• lossolo 3y ago
  It's because they learn small patterns from datasets, it doesn't matter whether the subjects are Sally, George, sisters, or apples. If a particular logic pattern was not in the training dataset, then the model did not learn it and will fail on most variations of this riddle. These transformer models are essentially large collections of local optima over logic patterns in sentences. If a pattern was not present in the dataset, there is no local optimum for it, and the model will likely fail in those cases.
• heliostatic 3y ago
  Seems to get it right on my first try. Interesting unreliability. User: Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have? Claude: To solve this, let's break it down step-by-step: We know that Sally has 3 brothers. Each of Sally's brothers has 2 sisters. This might make you think that there are 6 sisters in total (3 brothers × 2 sisters each). However, this is not the case. The sisters that each brother has are the same - they are Sally and one other sister. The question is asking how many sisters Sally herself has, not the total number of sisters in the family. Since Sally is a girl, she cannot be her own sister. Therefore, the number of sisters Sally has is equal to the number of sisters each of her brothers has minus herself. So, if each brother has 2 sisters, and one of those sisters is Sally, then Sally must have 2 - 1 = 1 sister. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister. https://0x0.st/H7Sc.02.png https://0x0.st/H7Sc.02.png
  • jedilord 3y ago
    [dead]
• auggierose 3y ago
  If we allow half-sisters as sisters, and half-brothers as brothers (and why would we not?), the answer is not unique, and could actually be zero.
• llmzero 3y ago
  Since: (i) the father and the mother of Sally may be married with other people, and (ii) the sister or brother relationship only requires to share one parent, we deduce that there is no a definitive answer to this question. Example: Sally has three brothers, Sally and their brothers have the same mother but a different father, and those brothers have two sisters Sally and Mary, but Mary and Sally are not sisters because they are from different fathers and mothers, hence Sally has no sister. For those mathematically inclined: Supposing the three brothers are called Bob (to simplify) and the parents are designed by numbers. FS = father of Sally = 7 MS = mother of Sally = 10 FB = father of Bob = 12 MB = mother of Bod = 10 FM = father of Mary = 12 MM = mother of Mary = 24 Now MS=MB=10 (S and B are brothers), FB=FM=12 (Bob and Mary are brothers), (FS=7)#(FB=12), and (MB=10)#(MM=24). Now S and M are not sisters because their parents {7,10} and {12,24} are disjoint sets. Edited several times to make the example trivial and fix grammar.
• ijustlovemath 3y ago
  Kagi's expert mode managed to handle this (rest directly from the chat): Based on the search results, we can break this down step-by-step: Sally has 3 brothers. Each of Sally's brothers has 2 sisters. Since all the brothers share the same 2 sisters, we are hearing about the same 2 sisters each time, not additional sisters. We know Sally is one of the 2 sisters that each brother has. Therefore, there must be one other sister that the brothers have besides Sally. In conclusion, Sally has 1 sister. The key thing to understand here is that when it says "each brother has 2 sisters", it is referring to Sally and one other sister that all the brothers share.
• geuis 3y ago
  Mixtral 8x7b-32768 got it on the first try: Sally has 1 sister. Here's the logic behind this: 1. We know that Sally has 3 brothers. 2. Then we are told that each brother has 2 sisters. 3. Since Sally is one of the children in the family, there must be another sister besides Sally. 4. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister. The number of sisters Sally has is not affected by the number of brothers she has, so the information about her brothers having 2 sisters is not relevant to finding the number of sisters Sally has.
  • Jackson__ 3y ago
    I'm amazed mistral is still doing the inverse chain of thought reasoning by default, even with their new large model. This causes it to get the question wrong for me, when testing, and only if I manually prompt normal CoT does it get it right. Is there any papers showing a merit to this approach? It seems extremely counter-intuitive.
  • lulznews 3y ago
    It got the answer but the reasoning in the last paragraph is wrong ..
  • walkieer 3y ago
    This is impressive because I forgot Sally counts as a sister too... and the reasoning for the most part is correct and really easy to understand.
• imtringued 3y ago
  Try this prompt instead: "Sally has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. Give each person a name and count the number of girls in the family. How many sisters does Sally have?" The "smart" models can figure it out if you give them enough rope, the dumb models are still hilariously wrong.