Comment by lukewarm707
5 days ago
I do control what it is, really. If I make an LLM, it is entirely what I did, there was nothing outside of my control. It was not beyond my control if the LLM does something I didn't expect.
There is some idea of a child being the author of themselves, the type of person who thinks certain things. The llm does not author itself, it does not choose to be anything, I dictate that.
> If I make an LLM, it is entirely what I did, there was nothing outside of my control.
Well kind of. Trainers of LLM might check LLM on any specific input data and tune its weights until output lands within acceptable bounds _for this given and fixed input_.
> It was not beyond my control if the LLM does something I didn't expect. Now hold on, to make sure output is acceptable for ANY input data trainers have to run weights with every possible input token combination. How is this possible? Do you have a method in mind?
This is not how it works. LLMs at large scale have emergent properties. They are not just a box of 'if-then-else' statements. That was the major revelation when they scaled them up. They are doing beyond what that naive view of 'if-then-else' expects.
I don't see anything inaccurate in my comment.
"If I make an LLM, it is entirely what I did, there was nothing outside of my control."
True?
"The llm does not author itself, it does not choose to be anything"
Also true?
I am not sure why I am still arguing, but maybe if I explain it another way, you will understand why what you are saying isn't true.
When you build an LLM, you base it on an immense knowledge base that you didn't create yourself.
It processes that information and, in simplistic terms, constructs its own underlying logic based on what it read. It's once removed from your direct instructions. If you think a human can manually edit or curate all that input content, go for it.
The developer who built the application isn't the author of the output, it is authored by the billions of data points it was trained on. Its choices and biases stem from that training data. No human is writing those billions of logic statements. The LLM is generating its own responses from the input knowledge, not the developer.
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How many computing operations occur when training an LLM? You're telling me you control every one of them. There is not enough entropy in the visible universe to do that.
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You conflated controlling "what it is" (you built it) and controlling "what it does" (you ran it and it did something bad that surprised you).
> If I make an LLM, it is entirely what I did, there was nothing outside of my control. It was not beyond my control if the LLM does something I didn't expect.
Substitute "Wright Model A" for "LLM" and imagine Orville Wright using this as his defense for why he didn't lose control over the plane, after his copilot was killed in a test flight.
You just have a very naive view of these systems.
"emergent" is not an excuse, or somehow a wall of non-causality.