4 ms·
"A lot of old documents were never digitized simply because people didn't think they had value. Is it time for a reinvigorated Google Books with a wider mission
by pmoriarty 4y ago
"A lot of old documents were never digitized simply because people didn't think they had value. Is it time for a reinvigorated Google Books with a wider mission?"
We have to be very careful with the "factual" content of old non-fiction works. So much of that, from history, to medicine, to biology, etc, turned out to be straight from their writers' imaginations. If an LLM considers such books to be no different from modern books on these subjects it would get a very skewed view of the world.
Imagine asking an LLM for a medical diagnosis and it responding with something about the humors.
- philipkglass 4y agoThat's a good point. I wonder how LLMs currently deal with the passage of time, if they can at all. Do they know that Satya Nadella is the current CEO of Microsoft and that Steve Ballmer no longer is simply because there are more training documents reflecting the present state of things, or is there an explicit time component that helps to resolve conflicting facts from different years? Based on what I've read so far about LLMs (and not actually working on any of these models myself), I wouldn't have thought they model time or facts in a way that you could expect them to resolve conflicting claims from a 2010 document and a 2020 document. Yet they're unreasonably effective at question answering anyway.