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I've beaten the drum a few times that it is important not to conflate LLMs with AI as a whole. LLMs are never going to solve this. That's OK. That's not their

by jerf 3y ago

I've beaten the drum a few times that it is important not to conflate LLMs with AI as a whole. LLMs are never going to solve this. That's OK. That's not their job. Their job in the long run will be to interface between the linguistic world and some other internal representation in some other AI that is structured differently and is capable of doing things language models aren't. I mean, it's right in the name: Language model. It's a bit weird to expect a language model to do other things. In a weird sort of way LLMs stand to set the industry back a bit as people try to tickle them into being more than a language model, rather than figuring out how to adapt them to feed something else that can model the non-linguistic world better. It's kind of nifty that language models can become so overpowered in some dimensions that they are able to do what they can sort of do today, but we would almost certainly be better off lowering the power of the language model and using that compute on something else that would work more like AI as we want it to... it's just that we don't know how to do that yet.

godelski 3y ago
I mostly agree. The only fine point I'd disagree on is that there is a significant (academic) camp that believes that language equates to understanding. That to properly speak requires understanding (fwiw, I think LLMs demonstrate that this isn't true). So I definitely understand the Layman confusion. But we'd have to get into other arguments like embodiment, if cognition is functional, and many other philosophical discussions. I don't think the public is generally acquainted with these ideas and it is certainly clear that a growing number of researchers aren't either. There's just too much to learn that it's easy to push of other things, especially as we chase benchmarks. So I understand how people get confused, which is why I try to respond in detail. But also I think many focus on tiny discrepancies or are willing to argue from a novice perspective as if it is authoritative (which corelates strongly with expertise). But I agree, there is a lot we don't know. But there are some things we can reject, which is all I'm trying to do and I think we agree there. Maybe you agree with my nit picking.

by jerf 3y ago

godelski 3y ago

I mostly agree. The only fine point I'd disagree on is that there is a significant (academic) camp that believes that language equates to understanding. That to properly speak requires understanding (fwiw, I think LLMs demonstrate that this isn't true). So I definitely understand the Layman confusion. But we'd have to get into other arguments like embodiment, if cognition is functional, and many other philosophical discussions. I don't think the public is generally acquainted with these ideas and it is certainly clear that a growing number of researchers aren't either. There's just too much to learn that it's easy to push of other things, especially as we chase benchmarks. So I understand how people get confused, which is why I try to respond in detail. But also I think many focus on tiny discrepancies or are willing to argue from a novice perspective as if it is authoritative (which corelates strongly with expertise). But I agree, there is a lot we don't know. But there are some things we can reject, which is all I'm trying to do and I think we agree there. Maybe you agree with my nit picking.