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0 pointsstevenhuang2y ago0 comments

you have the wrong conceptual model of how LLMs do the thing they do

0 comments

The only reason I say this is because I have tried. I asked an LLM to decode a variety of base64 strings, and every single time, it said the deocded ASCII was "Hello, world!"

This doesn't come as a surprise to me. Unless it was trained on a dataset that included a mapping of every base64-encoded character, it's just going to pattern-complete on sequences of base64-encoded-like characters and assume it translates to "Hello, world!" from some programming tutorial it was trained on.

M4v3R2y ago

Which model did you use? GPT-4 can encode and decode Base64, at least for short strings. I was pretty surprised when I first saw that. Proof:

https://chat.openai.com/share/9382be94-d59a-4a2a-b03b-43dba3...

https://chat.openai.com/share/421cc39e-ea9c-4ff6-9e45-1aa151...

waveBidder2y ago

3.5 can't, just tried and got this https://chat.openai.com/share/31e7038e-d594-4c6f-8f6e-27e920.... they probably specifically added a bunch of examples.

LinuxBender2y ago

Can it figure this one out without any hints? Not base64. Use case [1]

    ONXW2ZLUNBUW4Z2AONXW2ZLXNBSXEZJOORWGI===

[1] - https://ohblog.net/about/

1 more reply

TheGeminon2y ago

That kind of decoding is a bit different though. For one, the tokenization process makes encodings difficult to handle (unless it’s trained on a lot of pairs).

This would be more akin to asking ChatGPT to help build a black box parser for base64, not asking it to decode it itself.

JCharante2y ago

GPT4 can absolutely decode base64. Early jailbreaks were to base64 a python-based jailbreak to get it to output whatever you wanted and later OpenAI added a patch to filter base64 outputs to follow their rules.

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