Comment by coldtea
2 days ago
>The models don't get better, except when a new one is released. Their performance depends solely on the model training before release and how well you curate the context you feed it. That's it.
Not quite. The hosting side can change reasoning budgets (or re-assign what terms like "high" means), temperature and other decoding parameters, output length limits, finetune internal "hidden" prompt, latency optimizations, finetune attention algorithms, even change quantization - all still serving as the same model.
We know (or suspect) Anthropic frequently nerfs models while keeping their name and version the same.
Right. They can do all those things. And none of that will make it smart or able to learn new things. The underlying model is just an llm. But judging from the downvotes, it seems AI folks get upset when someone talks honestly about their precious piles of matrix multiplication.
Might bother you to use anthropomorphic terminology like smart and learning but they are capable of producing work that traditionally required human intelligence and the whole point of gpt 3 was the ability to "learn", you can give it an example of an invented brand new coding language and it can write working code in that language
Context is not the same as learning. It's easy to conflate because they're tightly coupled in our brains.
The underlying structure and tuning of the LLM are entirely unchanged by context. It merely affects the attention and activation of the network. The LLM will not be able to work with this hypothetical new language unless it is in context. This does not fit the computational meaning of learning.
Smart is not a well defined term. Nor is it's general idea formally understood. Use it freely, but you won't be saying anything meaningful unless you define your usage.
1 reply →
Yep, people always forget that early LLMs were sold as "Zero Shot Learning".
2 replies →
Intelligence can operate without learning. At a minimum inference and learning don’t need to be co-concurrent.
Not disagreeing with your point, but your terminology muddies your point.
But your point doesn't acknowledge that even with inference, there is a lot of room to tune the calculations. Multiple models, quantization tradeoffs are just the most obvious examples. Every architecture can be adjusted to increase intelligence/watt or other measure, even without further training.
No thats probably because you misread what you were replying to and your comment was out of left field. They didnt imply models get better intra-releasally at all.
You used the word "smart" now, whereas on the comment I replied to, you said "better".
Tuning those can definitely make a model respond better or worse.
So your claim (quoting 100% as written) that "Their performance depends solely on the model training before release and how well you curate the context you feed it" is wrong. Hence the downvotes.
Doesn't matter if LLMs are to be considered intelligent or not for the claim to be wrong.
> But judging from the downvotes, it seems AI folks get upset when someone talks honestly about their precious piles of matrix multiplication.
Often yes. In this case, it's more like they get upset when someone says something factually wrong, and then defensively changes the goalposts.
> Often yes. In this case, it's more like they get upset when someone says something factually wrong, and then defensively changes the goalposts.
Oh give me a break. Show me one example of 1) any knob twisting that makes the underlying model better. or 2) any example of the AI providers twisting those knobs to do anything other than degrade performance for their own bottom line or safety.
The current post says: "it would be expected for a better model to use different amounts of brevity if it gets better at determining the appropriate amount."
When no, the model cannot "get better". It doesn't determine any appropriateness of response realtime except for the weights baked into it from the beginning and whatever context it can muster. If you cram enough guidance that it doesn't decide to ignore maybe you can make it more brief. But it (the model) can do none of those things.
LLM models are literally stupid by design.
9 replies →
I can imagine an AI insulting humans in the same way:
"The underlying model is just a biological neutral network. It seems you carbonoids get upset when someone talks honestly about synapses and neuron firing."
Neural plasticity is real, and something LLMs are incapable of. So sorry.
1 reply →