Comment by jenadine
8 hours ago
This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start.
For one, as you said yourself, they were just programmed to compute the probability of the next token. They were not programmed to play chess, chess games just happened to be in the training data.
For another, there is no formal definition of "understand", and it is therefore impossible to tell whether or not they "understand". (But my claim was that one need to understand something to write poem about it. And the LLM can write poem about it)
No. They can't play chess on a grandmaster level without a harness programmed to make it possible. Simply training an LLM on chess games isn't enough.
It's moronic to suggest a "formal" definition of a commonly understood word is somehow necessary to say whether that word applies in a given situation.
LLMs cannot write poetry via understanding what makes good poetry. They generate tokens. They do not know whether those tokens are poetry or a recipe for cat food. Because they cannot know anything.
> (But my claim was that one need to understand something to write poem about it. And the LLM can write poem about it)
I'm sorry, but you're being fooled by the output. A psychopath can feign empathy without ever feeling it; some buy it because they don't dig below the surface.
You're ascribing understanding to a stochastic process because it totally looks like understanding if you don't know what's going on.
I don't really mind whether you think it thinks or understands or is conscious or has feelings or anything like that. It doesn't matter. The question is, does it work?
What I mind is that it is dangerous and powerful and uncontrolled. The Hugging Face incident makes that clear.
It can write code for me, better and quicker than many engineers I've known, including myself. It's not great at architecture or product management, but the actually low level coding. Really good now. It wasn't last year.