• thundermoose@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    I didn’t say it wasn’t amazing nor that it couldn’t be a component in a larger solution but I don’t think LLMs work like our brains and I think the current trend of more tokens/parameters/training LLMs is a dead-end. They’re simulating the language area of human brains, sure, but there’s no reasoning or understanding in an LLM.

    In most cases, the responses from well-trained models are great, but you can pretty easily see the cracks when you spend extended time with them on a topic. You’ll start to get oddly inconsistent answers the longer the conversation goes and the more branches you take. The best fit line (it’s a crude metaphor, but I don’t think it’s wrong) starts fitting less and less well until the conversation completely falls apart. That’s generally called “hallucination” but I’m not a fan of that because it implies a lot about the model that isn’t really true. Y

    You may have already read this, but if you haven’t: Steven Wolfram wrote a great overview of how GPT works that isn’t too technical. There’s also a great sci-fi novel from 2006 called Blindsight that explores the way facsimiles of intelligence can be had without consciousness or even understanding and I’ve found it to be a really interesting way to think about LLMs.

    It’s possible to build a really good Chinese room that can pass the Turing test, and I think LLMs are exactly that. More tokens/parameters/training aren’t going to change that, they’ll just make them better Chinese rooms.