this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 54 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (16 children)

[GPT-4] is fed, like, a line of text from some source, but with the last word missing. It guesses what the last word might be, and then it gets told whether or not it got it right so it can adjust its internal math.

GPT-4 cannot alter its weights once it has been trained so this is just factually wrong.

“It had to build, in its internal wirings and all its software neurons, some understanding of what an egg is - In other words, to get the next word right, it had to become intelligent. It’s quite a thought. It started with nothing. We jammed huge oceans of text through it, and it just wired itself into intelligence, just by being trained to do this one stupid thing.”

LLMs are really cool and very useful, don't get me wrong. But people get excited by what they seem to do and lose sight of what they actually can do. They are not intelligent. They create text based on inputs. That is not what intelligence is, unless you have an extremely dismal view of intelligence that humans are text creation machines with no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, no ability to plan... basically, no internal world at all.

An LLM is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

[–] mitchell@lemmy.ca 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Adam Something uploaded a video starting with the definition of intelligence itself, and then explains how something that “acts” intelligent doesn’t mean it “is” intelligent.

[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 9 points 11 months ago (9 children)

I think even "intelligence" here is a stretch. In a very narrow sense, it is intelligent: it creates text, simulates conversations, answers questions. But that is not what intelligence is (and it is all LLMs can do).

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[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 15 points 11 months ago (6 children)

The author is an imbecile if they haven't been able to break GPT. It took me less than one day of tooling around with it before I got it to say something which outed it as having no understanding of what we were discussing.

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[–] SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

GPT-4 cannot alter its weights once it has been trained so this is just factually wrong.

The bit you quoted is referring to training.

They are not intelligent. They create text based on inputs. That is not what intelligence is, unless you have an extremely dismal view of intelligence that humans are text creation machines with no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, no ability to plan... basically, no internal world at all.

Recent papers say otherwise.

The conclusion the author of that article comes to (LLMs can understand animal language) is.. problematic at the very least. I don't know how they expect that to happen.

[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 1 points 11 months ago (13 children)

In what sense does your link say otherwise? Is a world model the same thing as intelligence?

[–] SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

In the end of the bit I quoted you say: "basically no world at all." But also, can you define what intelligence is? Are you sure it isn't whatever LLMs are doing under the hood, deep in hidden layers? I guess having a world model is more akin to understanding than intelligence, but I don't think we have a great definition of either.

Edit to add: More... papers...

[–] Veraticus@lib.lgbt 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But also, can you define what intelligence is?

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Human intelligence is a mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

In no sense do LLMs do any of these except, perhaps, "understand and handle abstract concepts." But since they themselves have no understanding of the concepts, and merely generate text that can simulate understanding, I would call that a stretch.

Are you sure it isn’t whatever LLMs are doing under the hood, deep in hidden layers?

Yes. LLMs are not magic, they are math, and we understand how they work. Deep under the hood, they are manipulating mathematical vectors that in no way are connected representationally to words. In the end, the result of that math is reapplied to a linguistic model and the result is speech. It is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

I'm not really interested in papers that either don't understand LLMs or play word games with intelligence (shockingly, solipsism is an easy point of view to believe if you just ignore all evidence). For every one of these, you can find a dozen that correctly describe ChatGPT and its limitations. Again, including ChatGPT itself. Why not believe those instead of cherry-pick articles that gratify your ego?

[–] SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (25 children)

I’m not really interested in papers that either don’t understand LLMs or play word games with intelligence

I mean, my first paper was from Max Tegmark. My second paper was from Microsoft. You are discounting a well known expert in the field and one of the leading companies working on AI as not understanding LLMs.

Human intelligence is a mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

I note that's the definition for "human intelligence." But either way, sure, LLMs alone can't learn from experience (after training and between multiple separate contexts), and they can't manipulate their environment. BabyAGI, AgentGPT, and similar things can certainly manipulate their environment using LLMs and learn from experience. LLMs by themselves can totally adapt to new situations. The paper from Microsoft discusses that. However, for sure, they don't learn the way people do, and we aren't currently able to modify their weights after they've been trained (well without a lot of hardware). They can certainly do in-context learning.

Yes. LLMs are not magic, they are math, and we understand how they work. Deep under the hood, they are manipulating mathematical vectors that in no way are connected representationally to words. In the end, the result of that math is reapplied to a linguistic model and the result is speech. It is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

We understand how they work? From the Wikipedia page on LLMs:

Large language models by themselves are "black boxes", and it is not clear how they can perform linguistic tasks. There are several methods for understanding how LLM work.

It goes on to mention a couple things people are trying to do, but only with small LLMs so far.

Here's a quote from Anthropic, another leader in AI:

We understand the math of the trained network exactly – each neuron in a neural network performs simple arithmetic – but we don't understand why those mathematical operations result in the behaviors we see.

They're working on trying to understand LLMs, but aren't there yet. So, if you understand how they do what they do, then please let us know! It'd be really helpful to make sure we can better align them.

they are manipulating mathematical vectors that in no way are connected representationally to words

Is this not what word/sentence vectors are? Mathematical vectors that represent concepts that can then be linked to words/sentences?

Anyway, I think time will tell here. Let's see where we are in a couple years. :)

I’m not really interested in papers that either don’t understand LLMs or play word games with intelligence

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[–] notenoughbutter@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

are you not an algorithm?

perfected over thousands of years?

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