No doubt you've had A.I. give you answers that are clearly wrong or disobeyed an instruction, or did things you didn't ask it to do.
As a human, we have an innate need to know WHY and when we deal with humans that make such mistakes, we can ask them and get a reasonable response (I forgot, I overlooked, I thought it would be helpful, etc...). But LLMs know NOTHING after they've completed a task (after they've responded to you). They have NO internal thought processes that exists AFTER thhey've responded. When you ask them a question about WHY they did or didn't do something, they know ONLY what's visible in your text display of the conversation.
WHY? Because each interaction with the LLM is a fresh, new one. The entire text conversation is re-fed back into the LLM. The LLM has amnesia 100% of the time of 100% of everything that's ever happened before. It's like the move 50 first dates where the star of the show is a young woman with a head injury that wakes up every morning forgetting what happened the last 24 hours. Her latest memory is from just before her head injury (like an LLM that knows nothing beyond its training date), and the current day, and nothing in between. This is a NEAR PERFECT representation of what an LLM is. Every morning, she wakes up to a video tape with instructions to watch it. Her husband, whom she didn't meet until AFTER the injury, updates the tape to get her updated on her life every morning.
When YOU ask your LLM a question, the LLM has to first read the ENTIRE conversation to get caught up to be able to answer. But if your answer is WHY did you do what you did, if it's not in the text, it WILL NOT KNOW! But it WILL give you "an" answer, just not a TRUTHFUL answer. It will guess, and it will state it's guess as if it's a factual answer.
In short, it's a useless answer, so don't waste your limited token allotment asking it. You gain nothing from it and lose token usage and waste space in the limited context window (like the VHS tape the girl in the movie watches every morning). Only so much information can fit in it, so utilize that space wisely.
50 First LLMs - Don't Ask your LLM WHY it did what it did
By Mike
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