LLMs give us two furrowed brows
I’m writing a really important speech, trying to sum up an entire lifetime in a single page of text. Why in the world would I even think of using a stochastic parrot to help me get this done? Obviously, pretrained LLMs have no memory of this life so I would have to fine tune a model if I really wanted it to suggest memories or events to inspire my writing. But that doesn’t seem right, because an LLM can’t summarize something that it doesn’t understand, especially a human life. It can’t even suggest a particularly important episode or body of text in that life without pulling from its own stochastic stories of famous peoples’ lives. One thing LLMs are very good at, is named entity extraction. So if I ask it to find all mentions of Mom or Mormor or Carlana it’ll probably do a decent job. I can deal with it confusing Mormor for my grandmother and that will probably be useful because I can incorporate stories of her relationship with her mother into her life’s story. But I already have a good search tool, that know app that Ethan and I created last summer, and it turns out, small language models are much better for search than LLMs.
But what is one thing language models can reliably do that can help me with my essay writing? How about language? An LLM should surely be good at helping me with the English language. So when I am trying to tell a story about my English teacher mother and her scolding me for my furrowed brow, an LLM should be able to help me find out if she was saying that correctly, and what it really means.
ollama - llama3.2
✨: What is the definition or description of the phrase "furrowed brow"?
🤖: A "furrowed brow" is a idiomatic expression that refers to a person's face, typically their forehead, which appears to be
creased or lined with deep wrinkles, often due to concern, worry, or concentration. It can also imply a sense of seriousness,
thoughtfulness, or even sadness.
✨: What is a "furrowed brow"?
🤖: A furrowed brow is a physical expression where the forehead appears to be creased or lined with deep wrinkles, often due
to concern, worry, or concentration. It's a visible sign of someone's emotional state or mental activity. OK, that’s a bit confusing. So let’s try a little more.
🤖: It seems like I tried to execute an empty tool, which is not allowed.
Let me try again from the beginning. The conversation history remains:
These are the last commands executed by the user:
ask2
function ask3(){ /home/hobs/.code-PERMANENT/tangibleai/community/knowt/.venv/bin/python -c "print($@)" ; }
ask3 bye
function ask3(){ /home/hobs/.code-PERMANENT/tangibleai/community/knowt/.venv/bin/python -c "print('$@')" ; }
ask3 bye
✨: Is a furrowed brow the virtical crease or wrinkle between your eyebrows just above the bridge of your nose, or is it the horizontal wrinkles on your forehead that look like the furrows of plowed agricultural field?
🤖: A furrowed brow typically refers to the horizontal wrinkles on the forehead, which resemble the furrows of a plowed
field. These are deep creases that run across the forehead, often indicating concern, worry, or concentration.
The vertical crease between the eyebrows is more commonly referred to as a "frown" or an "eyebrow crease". Maybe I’m wrong, and Mom was wrong too, but that’s the opposite of the answer I was expecting.
So back to square one, I’ll do a good old fashioned web search.
When I search for furrowed brow online, I either get skin treatment advertisements, including images of eye cream being applied below the eyes, and not above.
I also get some educational material for people on the autism spectrum, like all of us these days.
And educational material seems to mention the phrase “furrowed brows.”
That kind-of make sense. Someone that thinks of words literally would probably associate the word brow with eyebrows.
But my Mom used words more poetically, less literally. She and I are both fans of old-school English literature. So I checked a RAG LLM, Phind, to see what it had to say about that phrase “furrowed brows”:
Is there something else that LLMs can help me with?