Sooo… if I’m reading this right, it’s possible to force an AI into extrapolating into the future. As in, it’ll answer as-if its training was based on data from future years.
Obviously this isn’t time travel, but more of a zeitgeist extrapolation.
I would expect that if an AI was made to answer like it’s from December 2024 it would talk a lot about the US election but it wouldn’t know who won — just that a “race is on.”
This could have actual utility: predicting trends, fads, new market opportunities, etc…
Kind of. You still need some data from the "future" to extrapolate it: In the paper, they take an LLM finetuned on 2015 political affiliation data, and add to it the difference between 2020 and 2015 Twitter data, and show that the performance is better when the new model is asked about 2020 political affiliation.
So, the LLM still needs to know about 2020 from somewhere. In a way, you teach it about the task, then separately you teach it about 2020, and this method can combine that to make it solve the task for year 2020.
Comments
Sooo… if I’m reading this right, it’s possible to force an AI into extrapolating into the future. As in, it’ll answer as-if its training was based on data from future years.
Obviously this isn’t time travel, but more of a zeitgeist extrapolation.
I would expect that if an AI was made to answer like it’s from December 2024 it would talk a lot about the US election but it wouldn’t know who won — just that a “race is on.”
This could have actual utility: predicting trends, fads, new market opportunities, etc…
Kind of. You still need some data from the "future" to extrapolate it: In the paper, they take an LLM finetuned on 2015 political affiliation data, and add to it the difference between 2020 and 2015 Twitter data, and show that the performance is better when the new model is asked about 2020 political affiliation.
So, the LLM still needs to know about 2020 from somewhere. In a way, you teach it about the task, then separately you teach it about 2020, and this method can combine that to make it solve the task for year 2020.
nah, this is not what they're talking about.
I don’t think it’d be nearly as accurate as purpose built future predictors.
LLMs aren’t a silver bullet for everything.
Ah, the bitter lesson teams it’s ugly head
Please explain this to my Product org.
lolol
Maybe less zeitgeist, but it would be really interesting to see what extrapolating future writing styles are like.
Here ya go: lorizzle.nl