Hacker News
points by QuadmasterXLII 13 hours ago | 0 comments
These all seem like phrases that people say a lot. If I had to guess what happened here, I’d suspect that the LLM being used for AutoCorrect was not successfully “alignment” (i.e. corporate happyspeak) tuned, it instead reflected the actual statistics of the internet, and the engineers resorted to inelegant brute force after having enormous difficulty getting it to talk like anything but a South Park caricature of Tourette’s.

Come to think of it, intuitively any attempt to solve this by tuning the LLM would make texters sound subtly like claude- in which case absolutely the blacklist is better.

[–] tavavex 13 hours ago
I would be shocked if an LLM is involved in any step of the process here. I guess the odds aren't zero, but swipe input is well over a decade old at this point. I see it as essentially a solved problem that's entirely doable with standard algorithms - not models, let alone the large language kind. Maybe some model could be used to analyze the context and shift the weight slightly to more probable phrases, but at the core, when you look at inputting single words, it's just checking the letters you swiped over, input timing, turning points and adjacent letters against its dictionary.
[–] metadat 12 hours ago
According to TFA the keyboard now uses a transformer based system to handle input and autocorrect.
[–] QuadmasterXLII 13 hours ago
according to the article, the blacklist appeared at the same time as the switch over to an LLM based auto complete. By my reading, but I’m not the world’s best reader.