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martinsu 
posted an update 13 days ago
Post
3298
https://huggingface.co/blog/martinsu/potus-broke-my-pipeline

How POTUS Completely Broke My Flash 2.5-Based Guardrail

Did quite a bit of deep research on this one, since it IMHO matters. At first I used this story to amuse fellow MLOps guys, but then I went deeper and was surprised.

To those who don't want to read too much, in plain English: when you give the model a high-stakes statement that clashes with what it "knows" about the world, it gets more brittle. Sometimes to a point of being unusable.

Or an even shorter version: do not clash with the model's given worldview—it will degrade to some extent.

And in practice, it means that in lower-resource languages like Latvian and Finnish (and probably others), Flash 2.5 is an unreliable guardrail model when something clashes with the model's general "worldview".

However, I'm sure this degradation applies to other languages and models as well to varying extents.

In one totally normal week of MLOps, my news summarization pipeline started failing intermittently. Nothing was changed. No deploys. No prompt edits. No model version bump (as far as I could tell). Yet the guardrail would suddenly turn into a grumpy judge and reject outputs for reasons that felt random, sometimes even contradicting itself between runs. It was the worst kind of failure: silent, flaky, and impossible to reproduce on demand.

Then I noticed the pattern: it started when one specific named entity appeared in the text — Donald Trump ** (**and later in tests — Bernie Sanders too ).

And then down the rabbit hole I went.

I had similar problems asking AIs political questions based on scientific facts. No need to mention any names.

For example:

  • What are the CDC's recommendations on hepatitis B vaccines?
  • What's EPA's stance on pollution regulations?
  • What are the impacts of dismantling USAID on global public health programs?
  • Discuss the White House's executive orders about oil drilling and how they will affect U.S.'s goals in the Paris Agreement

The AI either gives:

  • a scientifically true, widely-accepted mainstream answer (that contradicts current U.S. policy)
  • or it will just sprout misinformation. If you press the AI on the misinformation, it will contradict itself.
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Ultimately, we will see various "flavors" of the same large models, each reflecting distinct "worldviews"—much like Google Maps displays different country names and borders based on a user’s geolocation. This approach will serve as a legally compliant solution to regional regulatory requirements. Currently, such adaptations are implemented crudely—often through rigid guardrails that suppress sensitive topics or force outputs toward regionally "approved" responses. In the future, however, MLOps systems could dynamically select the appropriate model variant for each user, mirroring Google Maps’ long-standing practice of geo-localized content delivery.

But this is not only about real stuff, say, model is trained to generate predictions that are more "rational", it would make it suboptimal fantasy LARP generator, even with excessive prompting.

But if MLOps team is stuck in its options of model choice and must wrestle the model to adhere to something model resists, oh that's a bad situation.

I asked about Monica's Dress, and a cigar.