Comment by docjay
18 days ago
They neither understand nor reason. They don’t know what they’re going to say, they only know what has just been said.
Language models don’t output a response, they output a single token. We’ll use token==word shorthand:
When you ask “What is the capital of France?” it actually only outputs: “The”
That’s it. Truly, that IS the final output. It is literally a one-way algorithm that outputs a single word. It has no knowledge, memory, and it’s doesn’t know what’s next. As far as the algorithm is concerned it’s done! It outputs ONE token for any given input.
Now, if you start over and put in “What is the capital of France? The” it’ll output “ “. That’s it. Between your two inputs were a million others, none of them have a plan for the conversation, it’s just one token out for whatever input.
But if you start over yet again and put in “What is the capital of France? The “ it’ll output “capital”. That’s it. You see where this is going?
Then someone uttered the words that have built and destroyed empires: “what if I automate this?” And so it was that the output was piped directly back into the input, probably using AutoHotKey. But oh no, it just kept adding one word at a time until it ran of memory. The technology got stuck there for a while, until someone thought “how about we train it so that <DONE> is an increasingly likely output the longer the loop goes on? Then, when it eventually says <DONE>, we’ll stop pumping it back into the input and send it to the user.” Booya, a trillion dollars for everyone but them.
It’s truly so remarkable that it gets me stuck in an infinite philosophical loop in my own head, but seeing how it works the idea of ‘think’, ‘reason’, ‘understand’ or any of those words becomes silly. It’s amazing for entirely different reasons.
Yes, LLMs mimic a form of understanding partly through the way language embeds concepts that are preserved when embedded geometrically in vector space.
Your continued use of the word “understanding” hints at a lingering misunderstanding. They’re stateless one-shot algorithms that output a single word regardless of the input. Not even a single word, it’s a single token. It isn’t continuing a sentence or thought it had, you literally have to put it into the input again and it’ll guess at the next partial word.
By default that would be the same word every time you give the same input. The only reason it isn’t is because the fuzzy randomized selector is cranked up to max by most providers (temp + seed for randomized selection), but you can turn that back down through the API and get deterministic outputs. That’s not a party trick, that’s the default of the system. If you say the same thing it will output the same single word (token) every time.
You see the aggregate of running it through the stateless algorithm 200+ times before the collection of one-by-one guessed words are sent back to you as a response. I get it, if you think that was put into the glowing orb and it shot back a long coherent response with personality then it must be doing something, but the system truly only outputs one token with zero memory. It’s stateless, meaning nothing internally changed, so there is no memory to remember it wants to complete that thought or sentence. After it outputs “the” the entire thing resets to zero and you start over.
I'm using the Aristotelian definition of my linked article. To understand a concept you have to be able to categorize it correctly. LLMs show strong evidence of this, but it is mostly due to the fact that language itself preserves categorical structure, so when embedded in geometrical space by statistical analysis, it happens to preserve Aristotelian categories.