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One thing that is clouding this discussion is that most people are mixing up a lot of different characteristics that animals like humans have as if they were al
by ilaksh 3y ago
One thing that is clouding this discussion is that most people are mixing up a lot of different characteristics that animals like humans have as if they were all the same thing.
So for many people they don't really distinguish between things like "reasoning", "self-aware", "conscious", "alive", "sentient", "intelligent", "has world model". They also don't distinguish between different types or varying levels of cognitive abilities.
It seems clear that high functioning LLMs must have some type of world model. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily exactly the same type of highly grounded model that a human would have, especially if it was trained on only text. It might be less rich or different but still quite useful.
Another example, LLMs clearly don't have the same type of fast adaptation in a realtime 3d environment that animals have. (That's not to say that they can't mimic it in some rough ways).
But if you don't really break all of this stuff down carefully in your head then it can be hard to accept that LLMs are doing anything interesting. Because in that worldview, it's all the same thing, so they have to give the LLM all of the other characteristics at the same time.
- xpe 3y agoWell said. Also, the paper’s use of “world model” (instead of simply “model”) doesn’t help clarify the situation.
- sebzim4500 3y agoI do not see how referring to a world model as simply a "model" could possibly provide clarity. LLM literally stands for Large Language Model, it has a 'model' in it by definition.
- sgt101 3y agoWould we think of it differently if we called it LLC - large language correlation?
- kelseyfrog 3y agoIs-a vs has-a relationship.
- xpe 3y agoFair. Yeah, the word 'model' is highly overloaded. To me, 'domain model' would work better.
- moffkalast 3y agoIt's not the first time this has been a problem to accurately specify either. Throughout history animals proved nigh impossible to classify in these terms and were considered so many things, from something that's intertwined with nature as a hive mind of sorts, to complete automatons by Descartes, and later to beings that are mostly completely identical to us by Darwin. I suppose it's also an interesting juxtaposition, animals can do everything but talk, while LLMs can do nothing but talk.
- kridsdale3 3y agoSo all we have to do is plug a USB cable from a device running an LLM in to the back of a monkey.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoFor the most part our daily life doesn't depend on contrasting minimal pairs of these attributes. Humans, if they have one, tend to have all. AI entities, may exhibit one, or none or sometimes some and that maps poorly to our prior experience with reasoning entities. How would self-aware, non-conscious agent respond? How would a reasoning but non-intelligent agent respond?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoIf an LLM is trained on just text, then it's internal model can only be based on such text. I think the 'conceit' of LLM as AI advocates is that this model is just as (or at least nearly as) our own internal model - that the 'simplest' model to match the text is indeed our 'real' model that matches reality as a whole. A bit of a stretch surely!
- mjburgess 3y agoLLMs are a redemonstration of the lesson of sun worship: apes are easily fooled. If the output is indistinguishably 'world modelling', so must its mechanism be. There is no 'world' model in a hashmap from questions to answers about a world. There is only the condition that, given those questions, any old ape would accept those answers. Science is required to determine whether a system has properties, such as a rational ecology; ie. a genuine mechanism of environmental coordination. No engineer, no statistician, and certainly no VC HN Hype Man can determine-so. The nature of reality is no up for Big-O equivalences. Systems have properties in virtue of their nature, not in virute of what I will pay $20/mo for
- gaganyaan 3y agoSorry, that's just surface-level tripe. You could make the same dismissive comment about any new technology. You're not saying anything interesting.
- essive 3y agoI think the term "world model" is a highly overloaded term. What does it really mean in your opinion?
- ilaksh 3y agoA reasonably precise although not universal definition could be to take the data points from the study in relation to the use of those terms in the study. I think the main idea though is that there is some structure in the memory that resembles a structure in the real world to some meaningful degree. One aspect of this is composition, the other is how closely it maps to the real world. If it were literally just a lookup table where the indices did not correspond to physical proximity then it would definitely not be valid to say that this was really a world model in that context.
- esafak 3y agoSome understanding of the laws of nature, as we know it.