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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
475 points zdw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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barrkel ◴[] No.44485012[source]
The problem with viewing LLMs as just sequence generators, and malbehaviour as bad sequences, is that it simplifies too much. LLMs have hidden state not necessarily directly reflected in the tokens being produced and it is possible for LLMs to output tokens in opposition to this hidden state to achieve longer term outcomes (or predictions, if you prefer).

Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie? To say that the hidden state and its long term predictions amount to a kind of goal? Maybe it is. But we then need a bunch of new words which have almost 1:1 correspondence to concepts from human agency and behavior to describe the processes that LLMs simulate to minimize prediction loss.

Reasoning by analogy is always shaky. It probably wouldn't be so bad to do so. But it would also amount to impenetrable jargon. It would be an uphill struggle to promulgate.

Instead, we use the anthropomorphic terminology, and then find ways to classify LLM behavior in human concept space. They are very defective humans, so it's still a bit misleading, but at least jargon is reduced.

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1. viccis ◴[] No.44487390[source]
I think that the hidden state is really just at work improving the model's estimation of the joint probability over tokens. And the assumption here, which failed miserably in the early 20th century in the work of the logical posivitists, is that if you can so expertly estimate that joint probability of language, then you will be able to understand "knowledge." But there's no well grounded reason to believe that and plenty of the reasons (see: the downfall of logical posivitism) to think that language is an imperfect representation of knowledge. In other words, what humans do when we think is more complicated than just learning semiotic patterns and regurgitating them. Philosophical skeptics like Hume thought so, but most epistemology writing after that had better answers for how we know things.
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2. FeepingCreature ◴[] No.44488934[source]
There are many theories that are true but not trivially true. That is, they take a statement that seems true and derive from it a very simple model, which is then often disproven. In those cases however, just because the trivial model was disproven doesn't mean the theory was, though it may lose some of its luster by requiring more complexity.