this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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I was mostly posting this because the last time LLMs came up, people kept on going on and on about how much their thoughts are like ours and how they know so much information. But as this article makes clear, they have no thoughts and know no information.
In many ways they are simply a mathematical party trick; formulas trained on so much language, they can produce language themselves. But there is no “there” there.
True
False. There's plenty of information stored in the models, and plenty of papers that delve into how it's stored, or how to extract or modify it.
I guess you can nitpick over the work "know", and what it means, but as someone else pointed out, we don't actually know what that means in humans anyway. But LLMs do use the information stored in context, they don't simply regurgitate it verbatim. For example (from this article):
If you ask an LLM what's near the Eiffel Tower, it'll list location in Paris. If you edit its stored information to think the Eiffel Tower is in Rome, it'll actually start suggesting you sights in Rome instead.
They only use words in context, which is their problem. It doesn't know what the words mean or what the context means; it's glorified autocomplete.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "information." Since all of the words it uses are meaningless to it (it doesn't understand anything of what it either is asked or says), I would say it has no information and knows nothing. At least, nothing more than a calculator knows when it returns 7 + 8 = 15. It doesn't know what those numbers mean or what it represents; it's simply returning the result of a computation.
So too LLMs responding to language.
Why is that a problem?
For example, I've used it to learn the basics of Galois theory, and it worked pretty well.
So what if it doesn't understand Galois theory - it could teach it to me well enough. Frankly if it did actually understand it, I'd be worried about slavery.
Basically the problem is point 3.
You obviously know some of what it's telling you is inaccurate already. There is the possibility it's all bullshit. Granted a lot of it probably isn't, but it will tell you the bullshit with the exact same level of confidence as actual facts... because it doesn't know Galois theory and it isn't teaching it to you, it's simply stringing sentences together in response to your queries.
If a human were doing this we would rightly proclaim the human a bad teacher that didn't know their subject, and that you should go somewhere else to get your knowledge. That same critique should apply to the LLM as well.
That said it definitely can be a useful tool. I just would never fully trust knowledge I gained from an LLM. All of it needs to be reviewed for correctness by a human.
No, it shouldn't. Instead, you should compare it to the alternatives you have on hand.
The fact is,
So, if I have to learn something, I have enough background to spot hallucinations, and I don't have a teacher (having graduated college, that's always true), I would consider using it, because it's better then the alternatives.
There are plenty of cases where you shouldn't fully trust knowledge you gained from a human, too.
And there are, actually, cases where you can trust the knowledge gained from an LLM. Not because it sounds confident, but because you know how it behaves.
Obviously you should do what you think is right, so I mean, I'm not telling you you're living wrong. Do what you want.
The reason to not trust a human is different from the reasons not to trust an LLM. An LLM is not revealing to you knowledge it understands. Or even knowledge it doesn't understand. It's literally completing sentences based on word likelihood. It doesn't understand any of what it's saying, and none of it is rooted in any knowledge of the subject of any kind.
I find that concerning in terms of learning from it. But if it worked for you, then go for it.
Sadly we don't even know what "knowing" is, considering human memory changes every time it is accessed. We might just need language and language only. Right now they're testing if generating verbalized trains of thought helps (it might?). The question might change to: Does the sum total of human language have enough consistency to produce behavior we might call consciousness? Can we brute force the Chinese room with enough data?
They are the perfect embodiment of the internet.
They know everything, but understand nothing