this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (41 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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

are you not an algorithm?

perfected over thousands of years?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While whether LLMs are intelligent or not is still hotly debated. I think the author's thoughts are very interesting.

This is crazy to me. You can read in a stream of meaningless numbers (tokens) and incidentally build a reasonably accurate model of the real things those tokens represent.

The implications are vast. We may be able to translate between languages that have never had a “Rosetta Stone”. Any animals that have a true language could have it decoded. And while an LLM that’s gotten an 8 year old’s understanding of balancing assorted items isn’t that useful, an LLM that’s got a baby whale’s grasp on whale language would be revolutionary.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

LLMs can't do any of those things though...

If no one teaches them how to speak a dead language, they won't be able to translate it. LLMs require a vast corpus of language data to train on and, for bilingual translations, an actual Rosetta stone (usually the same work appearing in multiple languages).

This problem is obviously exacerbated quite a bit with animals, who, definitionally, speak no human language and have very different cognitive structures to humans. It is entirely unclear if their communications can even be called language at all. LLMs are not magic and cannot render into human speech something that was never speech to begin with.

The whole article is just sensationalism that doesn't begin to understand what LLMs are or what they're capable of.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are making sense of a language without a rosetta stone. The English llm talk is learned from English.

Now the corpus is a big work to do. But still.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No, they learn English (or any other language) from humans. Translation requires a Rosetta Stone and LLMs are still much worse at such tasks than dedicated translation programs.

Edit: I guess if you are suggesting that the LLM could become an LLM of the dead language and communicate only in said dead language, that is indeed possible. Since users would need to speak that dead language to communicate with it though I don’t understand the utility of such a thing (and is certainly not what the author meant anyway).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What about preserving languages that are close to extinct, but still have language data available? Can LLMs help in this case?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Preservation only but not likely any better than a linguistic historian.

But it gets tricky because LLMs only function on HUGE sets of data. LLMs are nothing more than complicated probability engines. Give it the question "What color is the sky?" and the math extracted from the massive databases that it has says the highest probability answer is "Blue". It doesn't actually KNOW the answer it just knows the probabilities of different words.

Without large amounts of data on the dying language current gen LLM's won't be accurate or able to generate reliable answers. Shoot... LLMs can barely generate reliable answers with the massive datasets they currently have.

I strongly recommend anyone even remotely interested in LLMs to read this interactive article:

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is a great article, thanks for linking it!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Curious your thoughts about this. Not an LLM but likely using transformers in the architecture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
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