Comment by netdevphoenix
1 day ago
> stochastic generation of language yields a form of recognizable intelligence.
Can you use a human language well enough and it not sound intelligent? And no, I don't mean just syntactically correct because semantics is a part of human languages too. I think the astounding thing is that they managed to model a language this well. It's like trying to learn English without a functional understanding of the word "Please".
My take is that a lot of the intelligence we natively ascribe to humans exist in human languages and just like the nutrients in your food, by harnessing a language that possesses latent intelligence, you too can behave like an intelligent person. And how did the nutrients of intellect got in there in the first place? Just like languages evolve nowadays: via contributions from speakers over time. Not unlike soil fertilisation.
And language itself is so very 'stochastic' too, due to complex subjectivity. Every word floats on a variable sea of individual choice.
For example, if I compose your post as :
--
"Good prose embodies intellect gradually evolved by myriad humans over time, so it wows me to see LLMs create it, though I soon realised that the intelligence is not being created by the LLM but rather is already present in the human-evolved input datasets - the prose itself! - which they statistically arrange."
--
..the particulars of the language are entirely different (and omit some of your chosen nuance) but most readers would receive the same "core truth" from it, the same measure of beneficial information.
Which highlights the great fluidity of language; that is another of the key underlying mechanisms allowing LLMs to flourish.
I think there is a distinction to draw there between stochasticity in the use and in the evolution of language (which is not clean as they are not independent). The language evolves stochastically, as it does so by being used in exchanges. But the use could be deterministic with the exchanges being random and the function of update based on exchange. I still think there is stochasticity in the use itself, I choose my words, go back and delete and rewrite, explain again in a different way when the audience looks at me unimpressed etc. I just don’t see fluidity as a proof of stochasticity of evolution or the other way around and in fact think the interaction is a quite interesting domain.