←back to thread

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
475 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
Al-Khwarizmi ◴[] No.44487564[source]
I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent.

The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing an UI events API and you were talking about zeros and ones, or voltages in transistors. Technically fine but totally useless to reach any conclusion about the high-level system.

We need a higher abstraction level to talk about higher level phenomena in LLMs as well, and the problem is that we have no idea what happens internally at those higher abstraction levels. So, considering that LLMs somehow imitate humans (at least in terms of output), anthropomorphization is the best abstraction we have, hence people naturally resort to it when discussing what LLMs can do.

replies(18): >>44487608 #>>44488300 #>>44488365 #>>44488371 #>>44488604 #>>44489139 #>>44489395 #>>44489588 #>>44490039 #>>44491378 #>>44491959 #>>44492492 #>>44493555 #>>44493572 #>>44494027 #>>44494120 #>>44497425 #>>44500290 #
grey-area ◴[] No.44487608[source]
On the contrary, anthropomorphism IMO is the main problem with narratives around LLMs - people are genuinely talking about them thinking and reasoning when they are doing nothing of that sort (actively encouraged by the companies selling them) and it is completely distorting discussions on their use and perceptions of their utility.
replies(13): >>44487706 #>>44487747 #>>44488024 #>>44488109 #>>44489358 #>>44490100 #>>44491745 #>>44493260 #>>44494551 #>>44494981 #>>44494983 #>>44495236 #>>44496260 #
1. ordu ◴[] No.44494551[source]
> On the contrary, anthropomorphism IMO is the main problem with narratives around LLMs

I hold a deep belief that anthropomorphism is a way the human mind words. If we take for granted the hypothesis of Franz de Waal, that human mind developed its capabilities due to political games, and then think about how it could later lead to solving engineering and technological problems, then the tendency of people to anthropomorphize becomes obvious. Political games need empathy or maybe some other kind of -pathy, that allows politicians to guess motives of others looking at their behaviors. Political games directed the evolution to develop mental instruments to uncover causality by watching at others and interacting with them. Now, to apply these instruments to inanimate world all you need is to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.

Of course, it leads sometimes to the invention of gods, or spirits, or other imaginary intelligences behinds things. And sometimes these entities get in the way of revealing the real causes of events. But I believe that to anthropomorphize LLMs (at the current stage of their development) is not just the natural thing for people but a good thing as well. Some behavior of LLMs is easily described in terms of psychology; some cannot be described or at least not so easy. People are seeking ways to do it. Projecting this process into the future, I can imagine how there will be a kind of consensual LLMs "theory" that explains some traits of LLMs in terms of human psychology and fails to explain other traits, so they are explained in some other terms... And then a revolution happens, when a few bright minds come and say that "anthropomorphism is bad, it cannot explain LLM" and they propose something different.

I'm sure it will happen at some point in the future, but not right now. And it will happen not like that: not just because someone said that anthropomorphism is bad, but because they proposed another way to talk about reasons behind LLMs behavior. It is like with scientific theories: they do not fail because they become obviously wrong, but because other, better theories replace them.

It doesn't mean, that there is no point to fight anthropomorphism right now, but this fight should be directed at searching for new ways to talk about LLMs, not to show at the deficiencies of anthropomorphism. To my mind it makes sense to start not with deficiencies of anthropomorphism but with its successes. What traits of LLMs it allows us to capture, which ideas about LLMs are impossible to wrap into words without thinking of LLMs as of people?