13 ms·

Honestly I’m not sure I ever understand the content myself and am instead repeating patterns of what has worked in the past applied to new domains.

c0pium 3y ago
You should be aware that not everyone is doing this. Contrary to what you might see on infosec twitter, not everyone is a trench coat covered pile of raccoons.
Retric 3y ago
The issue is apparent when you consider the kind of mistakes LLM’s make. If I ask you to guess a blue whale’s body temperature you’re not going to save 500C because you understand if that were true various other things would be happening. An LLM is more likely to give the correct answer to the blue whale question, but when you greatly penalize wildly incorrect answers they do noticeably worse.
themulticaster 3y ago
Yeah, I think coming up with definitions of "understanding" or "reasoning" that GPT-4 and friends supposedly don't fulfill is moving goalposts. To continue your line of thinking, when we add salt and pepper to a dish we've cooked, are we really doing it because we have a developed a thorough understanding of the human olfactory and gustatory systems [1] system, or because it tasted good previously when applied to similar recipes? And when it comes to understanding basic math, perhaps the patterns are still a tad to complicated for LLMs. Maybe there are too many surprising rules that appear out of nowhere and break the learnt patterns. But children struggle with those rules as well when they first come across them. Think about division through zero - when coming across the rule for the first time, you might wonder why it exists, instead of e.g. defining the result to be infinity. The answer to that question (not just "because that's the way things work!") is not obvious at all, to be honest I wouldn't be confident enough to attempt giving an explanation here. [1] I have to admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  > ...admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste. Ah, that must be why I consume pies with gusto. Yup, Wiktionary confirms: "Borrowed from Italian gusto, from Latin gustus (“tasting”). Doublet of cost."

c0pium 3y ago

You should be aware that not everyone is doing this. Contrary to what you might see on infosec twitter, not everyone is a trench coat covered pile of raccoons.

Retric 3y ago

The issue is apparent when you consider the kind of mistakes LLM’s make. If I ask you to guess a blue whale’s body temperature you’re not going to save 500C because you understand if that were true various other things would be happening. An LLM is more likely to give the correct answer to the blue whale question, but when you greatly penalize wildly incorrect answers they do noticeably worse.

themulticaster 3y ago

Yeah, I think coming up with definitions of "understanding" or "reasoning" that GPT-4 and friends supposedly don't fulfill is moving goalposts. To continue your line of thinking, when we add salt and pepper to a dish we've cooked, are we really doing it because we have a developed a thorough understanding of the human olfactory and gustatory systems [1] system, or because it tasted good previously when applied to similar recipes? And when it comes to understanding basic math, perhaps the patterns are still a tad to complicated for LLMs. Maybe there are too many surprising rules that appear out of nowhere and break the learnt patterns. But children struggle with those rules as well when they first come across them. Think about division through zero - when coming across the rule for the first time, you might wonder why it exists, instead of e.g. defining the result to be infinity. The answer to that question (not just "because that's the way things work!") is not obvious at all, to be honest I wouldn't be confident enough to attempt giving an explanation here. [1] I have to admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
> ...admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste. Ah, that must be why I consume pies with gusto. Yup, Wiktionary confirms: "Borrowed from Italian gusto, from Latin gustus (“tasting”). Doublet of cost."