Comment by sdenton4
1 year ago
"The models, in other words, do not well generalise to understand the relationships between people."
Curiously, the need to do this well - handling the quadratic complexity of a shifting set of human relationships, grudges, and alliances - is thought to be one of the things that led is to higher levels of intelligence.
Just to be clear, these models can answer questions about relationships between people if you mean family relationships.
Answering questions about what you're describing sounds really interesting. What would a training set be like that describes a bunch of complex human relationships and then asks questions about them with objective answers?
Of course, it would be easy to put such questions together, and I'm sure the LLM would do fine with them - there's a massive amount of human text about human relationships.
One difference, as in all ml training, is interactivity. Looking at ape studies, knowing the relationships is partly diagnostic, but it's also about planning and competition. And that competitive/adaptive aspect is what is what looks like a real evolutionary driver. If you can understand, navigate, and manipulate relationships successfully, you get more mating opportunities. Doing /that/ well involves both reasoning and long term planning, both of which are apparent in chimps.
A good book on this topic is 'are we smart enough to understand how smart animals are' by Frans de Waal.
https://wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-How-S...