4 ms·
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
by Eisenstein 10mo ago
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart.
Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
- anon84873628 10mo ago[flagged]
- mrits 10mo agoBeing able to learn to play Moonlight Sonata vs. being able to create it. Being able to write a video game vs being able to write a video game that sells. Being able to tell you newtons equations vs being able to discover the acceleration of gravity on earth
- Eisenstein 10mo agoSo if an LLM could do any of those things you would consider it very smart?
- this_user 10mo agoImagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content. Let's assume they are doing a pretty convincing job too. Now, the audience watching these scenes may think that the actor is actually speaking the language, but in reality they are just mimicking. This is what an LLM essentially is. It is good at mimicking, reproducing and recombining the things it was trained on. But it has no creativity to go beyond this, and it doesn't even possess true reasoning, which is how it will end up making mistakes that are just immediately obvious to a human observer, yet the LLM is unable to see them, because it just mimicking.
- Eisenstein 10mo ago1. I would argue that an actor performing in this way does actually understand what his character means 2. Why doesn't this apply to you from my perspective?
- retsibsi 10mo ago> Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content. Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His responses are always grammatical, always relevant to what you said modulo ambiguity, largely coherent, and accurate more often than not. You'll quickly realise that 'actor who merely memorized lines in a language he doesn't speak' does not describe this person.
- Salgat 10mo agoYou've missed the point of the example, of course it's not the exact same thing. With regard to LLM, the biggest difference is that it's a regression against the world's knowledge, like an actor who memorized every question that happens to have an answer written down in history. If you give him a novel question, he'll look at similar questions and just hallucinate a mashup of the answers hoping it makes sense, even though he has no idea what he's telling you. That's why LLMs do things like make up nonsensical API calls when writing code that seem right but have no basis in reality. It has no idea what it's doing, it's just trying to regress code in its knowledge base to match your query.
- retsibsi 10mo agoI don't think I missed the point; my point is that LLMs do something more complex and far more effective than memorise->regurgitate, and so the original analogy doesn't shed any light. This actor has read billions of plays and learned many of the underlying patterns, which allows him to come up with novel and (often) sensible responses when he is forced to improvise.
- captain_coffee 10mo ago> LLMs do something more complex and far more effective than memorise-regurgitate They literally do not, what are you talking about?
- mlmonkey 10mo agoYou are describing Searle's "Chinese Room argument"[1] to some extent. It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know what's going on"... [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
- x______________ 10mo agoIf an LLM was intelligent, wouldn't it get bored?
- jimbokun 10mo agoWhy should it?
- g947o 10mo agoHallucinating things that never exist?
- heavyset_go 10mo agoWisdom vs knowledge, where the word "knowledge" is doing a lot of work. LLMs don't "know" anything, they predict the next token that has the aesthetics of a response the prompter wants.
- Eisenstein 10mo agoIt doesn't seem obvious to me that predicting a token that is the answer to a question someone asked would require anything less than coming up with that answer via another method.
- subb 10mo agoI suspect a lot of people but especially nerdy folks might mix up knowledge and intelligence, because they've been told "you know so much stuff, you are very smart!" And so when they interact with a bot that knows everything, they associate it with smart. Plus we anthropomorphise a lot. Is Wikipedia "smart"?
- Eisenstein 10mo agoWhat is the definition of intelligence?
- anon84873628 10mo agoAbility to create an internal model of the world and run simulations/predictions on it in order to optimize the actions that lead to a goal. Bigger, more detailed models and more accurate prediction power are more intelligent.
- Eisenstein 10mo agoHow do you know if something is creating an internal model of the world?
- anon84873628 10mo ago