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Today's Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines (quandyfactory.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

You're guessing, you don't actually know that for sure, it seems intuitively correct, but we simply do not know enough about cognition to make that assumption.

Perhaps our ability to reason exclusively comes from our ability to predict, and by scaling up the ability to predict, we become more and more able to reason.

These are guesses, all we have now are guesses, you can say "it doesn't reason" and "it's just autocorrect" all you want, but if that were the case why did scaling it up eventually enable it to perform basic math? Why did scaling it up improve its ability to problemsolve significantly (gpt3 vs gpt4), there's so many unknowns in this field, to just say "nah, can't be, it works differently from us" doesn't mean it can't do the same things as us given enough scale.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I'm not guessing. When I say it's a difference of kind, I really did mean that. There is no cognition here; and we know enough about cognition to say that LLMs are not performing anything like it.

    Believing LLMs will eventually perform cognition with enough hardware is like saying, "if we throw enough hardware at a calculator, it will eventually become alive." Even if you throw all the hardware in the world at it, there is no emergent property of a calculator that would create sentience. So too LLMs, which really are just calculators that can speak English. But just like calculators they have no conception of what English is and they do not think in any way, and never will.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I’m not guessing. When I say it’s a difference of kind, I really did mean that. There is no cognition here; and we know enough about cognition to say that LLMs are not performing anything like it.

    We do not know that, I challenge you to find a source for that, in fact, i've seen sources showing the opposite, they seem to reason in tokens, for example, LLM's perform significantly better at tasks when asked to give a step by step reasoned explanation, this indicates that they are doing a form of reasoning, and their reasoning is limited by what I have no better term for than laziness.

    https://blog.research.google/2022/05/language-models-perform-reasoning-via.html

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    It is your responsibility to prove your assertion that if we just throw enough hardware at LLMs they will suddenly become alive in any recognizable sense, not mine to prove you wrong.

    You are anthropomorphizing LLMs. They do not reason and they are not lazy. The paper discusses a way to improve their predictive output, not a way to actually make them reason.

    But don't take my word for it. Go talk to ChatGPT. Ask it anything like this:

    "If an LLM is provided enough processing power, would it eventually be conscious?"

    "Are LLM neural networks like a human brain?"

    "Do LLMs have thoughts?"

    "Are LLMs similar in any way to human consciousness?"

    Just always make sure to check the output of LLMs. Since they are complicated autosuggestion engines, they will sometimes confidently spout bullshit, so must be examined for correctness. (As my initial post discussed.)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    You're assuming i'm saying something that i'm not, and then arguing with that, instead of my actual claim.

    I'm saying we don't know for sure what they will be able to do when they're scaled up. That's the end of my assertion. I don't have to prove that they will suddenly come alive, i'm not claiming they will, i'm just claiming we don't know what will happen when they're scaled, and they seem to have emergent properties as they scale up. Nobody has devised a way of predicting what emergent properties happen when, nobody has made any progress whatsoever on knowing what scaling up accomplishes.

    Can they reason? Yes, but poorly right now, will that get better? Who knows.

    The end of my claim is that we don't know what'll happen when they scale up, and that you can't just write it off like you are.

    If you want proof that they reason, see the research article I linked. If they can do that in their rudimentary form that we've created with very little time, we can't write off the possibility that they will scale.

    Whether or not they reason LIKE HUMANS is irrelevant if they can do the job.

    And i'm not anthropomorphizing them without reason, there aren't terms for this already, what would you call this behavior of answering questions significantly better when asked to fully explain reasoning? I would say it is taking the easiest option that still meets the qualifications of what it is requested to do, following the path of least resistance, I don't have a better word for this than laziness.

    https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/science-technology/artificial-intelligence-gpt-4-shows-sparks-of-common-sense-human-like-reasoning-finds-microsoft-89429

    Furthermore predictive power is just another way of achieving reasoning, better predictive power IS better reasoning, because you can't predict well without reasoning.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s your job to prove your assertion that we know enough about cognition to make reasonable comparisons.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    May as well ask me to prove that we know enough about calculators to say they won't develop sentience while I'm at it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Except calculators aren't models capable of understanding language that appear to become more and more capable as they grow. It's nothing like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Isn't it, though? Take two cells and rub them together, do it a bit more, boom here we are on Lemmy.

    We wouldn't refer to our consciousness as an emergent property of algae.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yes, but we would refer to our consciousness as an emergent property of our brain.

    And we're trying to build artificial brains.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Sorry, I guess what I was trying to say is that it doesn't take much to get from "calculator" to a system that is Turing complete, and from there we're just a few sleeps away from LLMs, and from there...

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