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Being able to make it and knowing how it works are just not the same thing. I can make bread of consistent quality, and know how to improve certain aspects of i
by wrs 1y ago
Being able to make it and knowing how it works are just not the same thing. I can make bread of consistent quality, and know how to improve certain aspects of it. To know how it works, I’d need to get a doctorate in biochemistry and then still have a fairly patchy understanding. I know plenty of people who can drive a car very successfully but would never claim they know how it works.
- ako 1y agoBut with LLMs is there really more to understand? They’re just large functions that take numerical input and transform it into numerical output based on trained weights. There is nothing behind the scenes doing things we don’t understand. The magic is in the weights, and we know how to create these based on training data. Regarding the car, if you know how to build a car, you understand how a car works. A driver is more like someone using and llm, not a developer able to create an llm.
- wrs 1y agoI’ve never seen the word “just” take on more load than it did in that second sentence! Sorry to inform everybody doing their Ph.D. on LLM interpretability that they’re just wasting their time.
- beyarkay 1y ago> But with LLMs is there really more to understand? Yes! loads! (: I want to be able to say statements like "this model will never ask the user to kill themselves" and be confident, but I can't do that today, and we don't know how. Note that we do know how to prove similar statements for regular software.