Human language seems to originate in grokking, in natural net terms. You first understand a concept, then you speak or write about it. When you hear or read som

Human language seems to originate in grokking, in natural net terms. You first understand a concept, then you speak or write about it. When you hear or read something, it isn’t retained well unless you can formulate an understanding of it. So language is a communication interface, not thinking itself. LLMs seem to create an illusion of understanding largely because we believe that understanding is a prerequisite for language — whoever uses this interface must be thinking! But that really seems to only be the case in our brains, not in LLMs. Grokking in NNs is interesting though. It’s going to be pretty wild times when we crack that nut open. If we could drive grokking on a large data set, it’s difficult to even imagine the possibilities. Who knows what we could grokk about the universe, for example. But that is still something only human brains can do regularly and reasonably well in heavily-parametrized situations. And even we get overwhelmed so easily by too many variables. I do hope ML grokking becomes much better than human understanding over time. But I don’t think we are close, sadly. We have just barely scratched the surface in toy models.