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The model doesn't have the capability of "knowing something"

• kesor 3y ago
  The model doesn't "know" anything. But if you provide it with certain assertions, it will repeat them back to you. For example, if you make a prompt saying "XX represents up, and YY represents down. Tell me how to write upside-down using these." ; Then you can argue that it "knows" which pairs of characters represent which direction. Not real knowledge, just regurgitation of whatever it was prompted with. https://chat.openai.com/share/f6c1d260-2246-4388-8c98-290a1d87ecf2 https://chat.openai.com/share/f6c1d260-2246-4388-8c98-290a1d... In exactly the same way your prompt is preceded with OpenAI's prefix that sets up some "facts" about itself, telling the model what its name is, what today's date is, and what it's knowledge cutoff date is. Even though they might have trained the model on much older (or much newer) data and texts, it will still tell you the cutoff date that is part of the prompt it was provided with.
  • xkcd1963 3y ago
    I'm not arguing against the useful capabilities of openai but rather the language we are using to describe LLMs. The terms "Thinking" and "Knowing" are not be used on computer systems. We should say "processing" and "in memory" instead, or similar. Why is it important not to use the false terms? Because its not the same and some people might start confusing machines for humans.