LLMs don’t understand any words.
I both agree and disagree. I think of them as golems. They do understand how to respond, but that’s as deep as it goes. It’s simulated understanding, but a very very good simulation… Okay maybe I do agree.
I think that at best you could say that they understand the relationship between tokens. But even that requires a really generous definition of the word “understand”.
There’s a saying…“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad.”
Meanwhile, LLMs are telling us to put glue on pizza so the cheese sticks. Even if the technology could eventually deliver on the promise, by the time we get there, nobody intelligent will trust it because the tech bros are, again, throwing half-baked garbage out into the world to try and be first to market.
it’s almost like this thing has no internal conceptual representation! I know this can’t possibly be, millions of promptfans and prompfondlers have told me it can’t be so, but it sure does look that way! wild!
It must have some internal models of some things, or else it wouldn’t be possible to consistently make coherent and mostly reasonable statements. But the fact that it has a reasonable model of things like grammar and conversation doesn’t imply that it has a good model of literally anything else, which is unlike a human for whom a basic set of cognitive skills is presumably transferable. Still, the success of LLMs in their actual language-modeling objective is a promising indication that it’s feasible for a ML model to learn complex abstractions.
if I copy a coherent sentence into my clipboard, my clipboard becomes capable of consistently making coherent statements
Yes, but that’s not how LLMs work. My statement depends heavily on the fact that a LLM like GPT is coaxed into coherence by unsupervised or semi-supervised training. That the training process works is the evidence of an internal model (of language/related concepts), not just the fact that something outputs coherent statements.
Ha, I love the sauce on that headline.
it seems like it’s not the worst way to write text if I don’t want to allow an ai to parse my messages…
not being not sure to fail to not write like this could become the opposite of interesting after a time that isn’t long, though