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That question can't be answered reliably without knowing the training data used. LLMs are great at being interfaces to the data they were trained on. Ask them

by imiric 4y ago

That question can't be answered reliably without knowing the training data used. LLMs are great at being interfaces to the data they were trained on. Ask them anything beyond that, and it becomes clear they're not capable of thinking like humans do, i.e. producing novel ideas. It's kind of absurd we're having this discussion, TBH. The only reason it's difficult to distinguish mimicry from thinking is because of the sheer volume of data we're talking about here, and some clever algorithms that find correlations in it, and can synthesize a human-like response. This is exacerbated by the fact that human education is built around memorization, and that we equate intelligence with being able to regurgitate previously known facts. So if this is your measuring stick, then by all means LLMs can be considered intelligent agents capable of rational thought, when in reality this is far from the truth.

flangola7 4y ago
It doesn't know anything post September 2021, that's plenty of data that can be used to test its reasoning abilities and yet it still succeeds. It doesn't know specific facts about world events, but it can clearly reason about them if you give it a brief blurb about what it has missed out on - just like a human could after waking from long coma. >the sheer volume of data we're talking about here, and some clever algorithms that find correlations in it, and can synthesize a human-like response. If you swap the volume of data from "terabytes of UTF-8" to "decades of continuous input from the 5 senses," this doesn't sound very different than what you or I do already. The fact that it's difficult to differentiate mimicking from true thinking strongly suggests that there really isn't a difference, or at minimum not one that has any real world practical significance. If there is a scenario where the difference does have practical significance, what scenario is that? Because I sure can't think of one.

by imiric 4y ago

flangola7 4y ago

It doesn't know anything post September 2021, that's plenty of data that can be used to test its reasoning abilities and yet it still succeeds. It doesn't know specific facts about world events, but it can clearly reason about them if you give it a brief blurb about what it has missed out on - just like a human could after waking from long coma. >the sheer volume of data we're talking about here, and some clever algorithms that find correlations in it, and can synthesize a human-like response. If you swap the volume of data from "terabytes of UTF-8" to "decades of continuous input from the 5 senses," this doesn't sound very different than what you or I do already. The fact that it's difficult to differentiate mimicking from true thinking strongly suggests that there really isn't a difference, or at minimum not one that has any real world practical significance. If there is a scenario where the difference does have practical significance, what scenario is that? Because I sure can't think of one.