4 ms·

The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. There’s such a huge amount of tacit knowledge we have about how the world work

The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. There’s such a huge amount of tacit knowledge we have about how the world works and how other people work. We have models for recognizing faces and reading body language, emotions, and intent. We can tell when a person is looking at us from across the room and tell that apart from someone looking just over our shoulder at someone else. I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia. We infer a mind behind the text because our brains are built to recognize minds. That’s how our theory of mind works. But these LLMs know nothing about the world. They might capture some features of the world as patterns that help them better predict what text to generate for us. But that is not the same as knowledge of the world. They have no sensory contact with the world so they are unable to synthesize true knowledge about it. This is why they are so prone to hallucination.

jamiek88 3y ago
> I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia This is a great way of expressing a thought I’ve been unable to fully articulate.
kordlessagain 3y ago
So we are model ensembles, probably capable of real-time training of short term memory. LLMs are maybe a type of mind. They may carry and operate on basic thoughts, ideas, books, pages, sentences, words, letters…. They can probably problem solve and write code that runs sometimes. What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. I don’t have to imagine anything in mind to process thoughts. All I need is an attention loop.
- chongli 3y ago
  What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. Knowledge is justified true belief. If you park your car on 5th avenue, you know it is parked there because you witnessed yourself parking it there. You have strong justification for your belief that you parked it on 5th avenue. But if you then go to work and your car is out of sight, your justification fades. If you look out the window and see your car parked there, you reaffirm your belief. However, if you look and your car is not there, you realize you don’t know where your car is. For a period of time you were mistaken in your belief about the whereabouts of your car. During the time when your car was out of sight, you went from knowing to not knowing where your car was, but nothing changed inside your mind. To update your belief, you needed new information about the world. An LLM has no justification for any of the information in its training set. It has no experiences with which to connect words and facts to real world objects and events. Therefore it cannot be said to have knowledge of any of it.
  - Davidzheng 3y ago
    I think this is an incredibly strict definition of knowledge that would preclude many experts from many fields--and very different from how it is normally used.
    - chongli 3y ago
      It's not my opinion, it's the standard philosophical account of knowledge [1]. Do you have any examples of "experts" whose basic knowledge would be precluded by this definition? [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ...
persnickety 3y ago
Text might be indirect, but it's crucially still about the world. I could say that being ale to read is one of the senses, and no sense reflects the world in itself, but rather is an indirection. But I won't do it. Instead, I'll just replace a few words in your last paragraph to reveal that it doesn't discredit LLMs as much as it seems. * * * But these historians know nothing about the distant past. They might capture some features of the past as patterns that help them better predict where to start an archaeological dig. But that is not the same as knowledge of the past. They have no sensory contact with the past so they are unable to sunthesize true knoledge about it. This is why they are prone to hallucination.
- chongli 3y ago
  Text might be indirect, but it's crucially still about the world. I could say that being ale to read is one of the senses, and no sense reflects the world in itself, but rather is an indirection. Two things: Justification for belief isn’t a binary state, it’s a spectrum. When we have a small amount of evidence supporting a belief, we have a small justification. When we have a large amount of evidence, we have a large justification. We describe this in terms of our confidence in our beliefs. Without getting too far off into the weeds, this extends into all areas of science. We can’t see, touch, hear, smell, or taste electrons (9V battery tests notwithstanding), but we can gain confidence by replicating experiments with them. Working with a cathode ray tube, for example, we can manipulate the voltage on the plates and directly observe the deflection of the point of light on the screen. We can use the equations from a physics textbook, combined with voltage measurements on a multimeter, to make predictions about the electron beam’s deflection and then test them directly on the device. Secondly (and crucially), the text consumed by LLMs isn’t about the world. It’s text of unknown provenance. Some of it may be about the world, some of it may be complete fiction. The LLM has no basis whatsoever for fact-checking the text. All it can do is perform a statistical test on the commonality of a text and then infer from that. Unfortunately that does not get you any closer to reality. A falsehood repeated many times does not become the truth. As for historians? They have way more than text to go on. They have physical evidence (artifacts), they have radioisotope testing, they have DNA testing. They have geographic locations where texts were found. None of this real world sense data is available to an LLM.
famouswaffles 3y ago
>The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. It's not trained on "the world". It's trained on a small slice of it, a few senses that are themselves slimmed down and then fabricated at parts. To the bird that can feel and sense electromagnetic waves intuitively to guide travels, you're not trained on "the world" >This is why they are so prone to hallucination. No it's not. LLMs can distinguish between truth and hallucination. They just don't care to communicate that. GPT-4 logits calibration pre RLHF - https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975 Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words - https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334 Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know - https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221 The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824

jamiek88 3y ago

> I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia This is a great way of expressing a thought I’ve been unable to fully articulate.

kordlessagain 3y ago

So we are model ensembles, probably capable of real-time training of short term memory. LLMs are maybe a type of mind. They may carry and operate on basic thoughts, ideas, books, pages, sentences, words, letters…. They can probably problem solve and write code that runs sometimes. What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. I don’t have to imagine anything in mind to process thoughts. All I need is an attention loop.

chongli 3y ago
What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. Knowledge is justified true belief. If you park your car on 5th avenue, you know it is parked there because you witnessed yourself parking it there. You have strong justification for your belief that you parked it on 5th avenue. But if you then go to work and your car is out of sight, your justification fades. If you look out the window and see your car parked there, you reaffirm your belief. However, if you look and your car is not there, you realize you don’t know where your car is. For a period of time you were mistaken in your belief about the whereabouts of your car. During the time when your car was out of sight, you went from knowing to not knowing where your car was, but nothing changed inside your mind. To update your belief, you needed new information about the world. An LLM has no justification for any of the information in its training set. It has no experiences with which to connect words and facts to real world objects and events. Therefore it cannot be said to have knowledge of any of it.
- Davidzheng 3y ago
  I think this is an incredibly strict definition of knowledge that would preclude many experts from many fields--and very different from how it is normally used.
  - chongli 3y ago
    It's not my opinion, it's the standard philosophical account of knowledge [1]. Do you have any examples of "experts" whose basic knowledge would be precluded by this definition? [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ...

persnickety 3y ago

Text might be indirect, but it's crucially still about the world. I could say that being ale to read is one of the senses, and no sense reflects the world in itself, but rather is an indirection. But I won't do it. Instead, I'll just replace a few words in your last paragraph to reveal that it doesn't discredit LLMs as much as it seems. * * * But these historians know nothing about the distant past. They might capture some features of the past as patterns that help them better predict where to start an archaeological dig. But that is not the same as knowledge of the past. They have no sensory contact with the past so they are unable to sunthesize true knoledge about it. This is why they are prone to hallucination.

chongli 3y ago
Text might be indirect, but it's crucially still about the world. I could say that being ale to read is one of the senses, and no sense reflects the world in itself, but rather is an indirection. Two things: Justification for belief isn’t a binary state, it’s a spectrum. When we have a small amount of evidence supporting a belief, we have a small justification. When we have a large amount of evidence, we have a large justification. We describe this in terms of our confidence in our beliefs. Without getting too far off into the weeds, this extends into all areas of science. We can’t see, touch, hear, smell, or taste electrons (9V battery tests notwithstanding), but we can gain confidence by replicating experiments with them. Working with a cathode ray tube, for example, we can manipulate the voltage on the plates and directly observe the deflection of the point of light on the screen. We can use the equations from a physics textbook, combined with voltage measurements on a multimeter, to make predictions about the electron beam’s deflection and then test them directly on the device. Secondly (and crucially), the text consumed by LLMs isn’t about the world. It’s text of unknown provenance. Some of it may be about the world, some of it may be complete fiction. The LLM has no basis whatsoever for fact-checking the text. All it can do is perform a statistical test on the commonality of a text and then infer from that. Unfortunately that does not get you any closer to reality. A falsehood repeated many times does not become the truth. As for historians? They have way more than text to go on. They have physical evidence (artifacts), they have radioisotope testing, they have DNA testing. They have geographic locations where texts were found. None of this real world sense data is available to an LLM.

famouswaffles 3y ago

>The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. It's not trained on "the world". It's trained on a small slice of it, a few senses that are themselves slimmed down and then fabricated at parts. To the bird that can feel and sense electromagnetic waves intuitively to guide travels, you're not trained on "the world" >This is why they are so prone to hallucination. No it's not. LLMs can distinguish between truth and hallucination. They just don't care to communicate that. GPT-4 logits calibration pre RLHF - https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975 Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words - https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334 Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know - https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221 The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824