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Comparing religion to LLM mistakes is a case of the very prevalent anthropomorphism in society currently. I fear this misunderstanding and conflation will preve
by elicksaur 3y ago
Comparing religion to LLM mistakes is a case of the very prevalent anthropomorphism in society currently. I fear this misunderstanding and conflation will prevent us actually improving the tech.
Coming to an incorrect explanation such as, “Helios pulls the Sun across the sky every day,” is categorically different than a math program incorrectly returning the most likely next token in a sequence. LLMs don’t have beliefs at all.
Helios answers a question “Why does the Sun rise?” Holding such a belief shows a logical understanding that some force must be doing this, but due to a lack of knowledge of the world, the person comes up with an incorrect explanation.
LLMs can’t pose and reason about such questions. It is just not the same class of “hallucinations.” Assuming we’ve figured out cognition via word prediction is going to get us nowhere fast in the long term.
- ninetyninenine 3y agoNo. I never said we figured out cognition. The LLM is still a black box feed forward network. It is the intricacies of how signals interact with each other in this network that we don't fully understand. Word prediction and curve fitting are high level concepts we used to build an intelligence we don't fully understand. Also belief and understanding are orthogonal concepts. I can believe something I don't understand and I can understand something I don't belief. My claim here is that LLMs understand things from a certain aspect because LLMs can produce output indistinguishable from understanding. Also because both the human brain and the LLM are black boxes there is no other metric we can use to gauge the level of understanding an LLM has other than comparing it's inputs and outputs to the human brain.