5 ms·

It is a very basic fact that LLMs have no concept of true or false, it only has an ability to look up what text data it has seen before. If you do not understan

It is a very basic fact that LLMs have no concept of true or false, it only has an ability to look up what text data it has seen before. If you do not understand this you are in no position to discuss LLMs.

ewild 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
I really don't know what people mean when they say this. We routinely instruct computer chips to evaluate whether some condition is true and take action on that basis, even though the chip is "just" a selectively doped rock. Why would the details of an LLM's underlying architecture mean that it can't have a concept of true or false?
xcv123 3y ago
One of the most ridiculous comments I have read about LLMs here. The ~100 layer deep neural networks infer many levels of features over the text, including the concept of true and false. That is trivial for an LLM. Are you completely unaware these are based on deep neural networks? Convolutional Neural Networks don't operate by "look up" of text data.
- user_named 3y ago
  Okay, so then tell me how does it decide whether it is true or false that Biden is the POTUS? It's response is not based on facts about the world as it exists, but on the text data it has been trained on. As such, it is not able to determine true or false even if the response in the above example would be correct.
  - jeffparsons 3y ago
    Serious question, in pursuit of understanding where you're coming from: in what way do you think that your own reckoning is fundamentally different to or more "real" than what you're describing above? I know I don't experience the world as it is, but rather through a whole bunch of different signals I get that give me some hints about what the real world might be. For example, text.
    - Guvante 3y ago
      You understand the concept of true vs false. LLM does not, that isn't how it works. You can say the difference is academic but there is a difference. What is the difference between a real good faker of intelligence and actual intelligence is an open question. But I will say most AI experts agree that LLM are not artificial general intelligence. It isn't just a lack of training data, they just are not of the category that we mean by that.
      - xcv123 3y ago
        > You understand the concept of true vs false. > LLM does not, that isn't how it works. GPT-4 can explain the concept when prompted and can evaluate logic problems better than most human beings can. I would say it has a deeper understanding of "true vs false" than most humans. I think what you are trying to say is that LLMs are not conscious. Consciousness has no precise universally agreed formal definition, but we all know that LLMs are not conscious.
        weebull 3y ago
        > GPT-4 can explain the concept when prompted and can evaluate logic problems better than most human beings can. I would say it has a deeper understanding of "true vs false" than most humans. Sigh GPT produces output which obeys the patterns it has been trained on for definitions of true and false. It does not understand anything. It is a token manipulation machine. It does it well enough that it convinces you, a walking ape, that it understands. It does not.
jeffparsons 3y ago
They have no inherent concept of true or false, sure. But what are you comparing them to? It would be bold to propose that humans have some inherent concept of true or false in a way that LLMs do not; for both humans and LLMs it seems to be emergent.
robbrown451 3y ago
It certainly doesn't "look up" text data it has seen before. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how this stuff works. That's exactly why I use the example above of Alpha Zero and how it learns to play Go, since that demonstrates very clearly that it's not just looking things up. And I have no idea what you mean by saying that it has no concept of true or false. Even the simplest computer programs have a concept of true or false, that's kind of the simplest data type, a boolean. Large language models have a much more sophisticated concept of true and false that has a lot more nuance. That's really a pretty ridiculous thing to say.
- user_named 3y ago
  Yes, you don't understand what I said. The model has no concept of true or false. It only has embeddings. If 'asked' a question it can see if that is consistent with its embeddings and probabilities or not. This is not a representation of the real world, of facts, but simply a product of its training.
  - robbrown451 3y ago
    "This is not a representation of the real world, of facts, but simply a product of its training." Tell me how that doesn't apply to the human brain as well.

ewild 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 3y ago

I really don't know what people mean when they say this. We routinely instruct computer chips to evaluate whether some condition is true and take action on that basis, even though the chip is "just" a selectively doped rock. Why would the details of an LLM's underlying architecture mean that it can't have a concept of true or false?

xcv123 3y ago

One of the most ridiculous comments I have read about LLMs here. The ~100 layer deep neural networks infer many levels of features over the text, including the concept of true and false. That is trivial for an LLM. Are you completely unaware these are based on deep neural networks? Convolutional Neural Networks don't operate by "look up" of text data.

user_named 3y ago
Okay, so then tell me how does it decide whether it is true or false that Biden is the POTUS? It's response is not based on facts about the world as it exists, but on the text data it has been trained on. As such, it is not able to determine true or false even if the response in the above example would be correct.
- jeffparsons 3y ago
  Serious question, in pursuit of understanding where you're coming from: in what way do you think that your own reckoning is fundamentally different to or more "real" than what you're describing above? I know I don't experience the world as it is, but rather through a whole bunch of different signals I get that give me some hints about what the real world might be. For example, text.
  - Guvante 3y ago
    You understand the concept of true vs false. LLM does not, that isn't how it works. You can say the difference is academic but there is a difference. What is the difference between a real good faker of intelligence and actual intelligence is an open question. But I will say most AI experts agree that LLM are not artificial general intelligence. It isn't just a lack of training data, they just are not of the category that we mean by that.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      > You understand the concept of true vs false. > LLM does not, that isn't how it works. GPT-4 can explain the concept when prompted and can evaluate logic problems better than most human beings can. I would say it has a deeper understanding of "true vs false" than most humans. I think what you are trying to say is that LLMs are not conscious. Consciousness has no precise universally agreed formal definition, but we all know that LLMs are not conscious.
      - weebull 3y ago
        > GPT-4 can explain the concept when prompted and can evaluate logic problems better than most human beings can. I would say it has a deeper understanding of "true vs false" than most humans. Sigh GPT produces output which obeys the patterns it has been trained on for definitions of true and false. It does not understand anything. It is a token manipulation machine. It does it well enough that it convinces you, a walking ape, that it understands. It does not.

jeffparsons 3y ago

They have no inherent concept of true or false, sure. But what are you comparing them to? It would be bold to propose that humans have some inherent concept of true or false in a way that LLMs do not; for both humans and LLMs it seems to be emergent.

robbrown451 3y ago

It certainly doesn't "look up" text data it has seen before. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how this stuff works. That's exactly why I use the example above of Alpha Zero and how it learns to play Go, since that demonstrates very clearly that it's not just looking things up. And I have no idea what you mean by saying that it has no concept of true or false. Even the simplest computer programs have a concept of true or false, that's kind of the simplest data type, a boolean. Large language models have a much more sophisticated concept of true and false that has a lot more nuance. That's really a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

user_named 3y ago
Yes, you don't understand what I said. The model has no concept of true or false. It only has embeddings. If 'asked' a question it can see if that is consistent with its embeddings and probabilities or not. This is not a representation of the real world, of facts, but simply a product of its training.
- robbrown451 3y ago
  "This is not a representation of the real world, of facts, but simply a product of its training." Tell me how that doesn't apply to the human brain as well.