harperlee

   - Prosody. Prosody can vary per region but a distinctly alien prosody to a language is a barrier for the receptor of the message, that expects a given language and a range of prosodies. E.g. as I know french quite well, hearing english with a heavy french accent makes my brain try to understand what's being said as said in french, and interferes a lot.

   - Sound shifts for particular phonemes. While some of it might be local to the language in certain registers (idea --> /ide"er"/, three --> /free/), others are clearly issues in the target language pronunciation (eg. japanese people having trouble with the l phoneme, spanish people adding an /e/ sound prior to an s-mobile, or v versus b for spanish people also).

   - Connected speech. Where do you end words, how do you omit sounds, etc. Also massive hindrance to understanding.

   - Grammar. Alien grammar is a hindrance to communication. You need to learn that.

  1. Even if the task is unreasonable, it is good to showcase that the LLM will perform poorly - warning not to be used for diabetes.

  2. As it is a probabilistic model, the approach was to execute it multiple times and look at the distribution. They also tried to minimize variance: "All at the lowest randomness setting these models offer.", the post mentions. Yet the variance of the responses is surprising.

  3. A multimodal LLM should be in general able to discriminate between crema catalana and a cheese sandwich, and provide a textual, uncalculated range of how much calories the item has (internet is full with tables for calorie counting and things such as this https://fitia.app/calories-nutritional-information/cheese-sandwich-1205647).

  4. It is not clear that the "expose" surprised / outraged style is just a communication vehicle or if the author really thought that e.g. LLMs could be hypothetically able to provide confidence estimates.