this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can't talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don't.
But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
That's a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!
Now... Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog... That's another question.
I don't want to spam this link but seriously watch this 3blue1brown video on how text transformers work. You're right on that last part, but its a far fetch from an intelligence. Just a very intelligent use of statistical methods. But its precisely that reason that reason it can be "convinced", because parameters restraining its output have to be weighed into the model, so its just a statistic that will fail.
Im not intending to downplay the significance of GPTs, but we need to baseline the hype around them before we can discuss where AI goes next, and what it can mean for people. Also far before we use it for any secure services, because we've already seen what can happen
Did you know there is no rigorous scientific definition of intelligence?
Edit. facts
We do not have a rigorous model of the brain, yet we have designed LLMs. Experts of decades in ML recognize that there is no intelligence happening here, because yes, we don't understand intelligence, certainly not enough to build one.
If we want to take from definitions, here is Merriam Webster
The context stack is the closest thing we have to being able to retain and apply old info to newer context, the rest is in the name. Generative Pre-Trained language models, their given output is baked by a statiscial model finding similar text, also coined Stocastic parrots by some ML researchers, I find it to be a more fitting name. There's also no doubt of their potential (and already practiced) utility, but a long shot of being able to be considered a person by law.
"I offered no insights. I simply parroted that which I have read in books, seen in films, observed in all of you."
That statement of yours just means "we don't yet know how it works hence it must work in the way I believe it works", which is about the most illogical "statement" I've seen in a while (though this being the Internet, it hasn't been all that long of a while).
"It must be clever statistics" really doesn't follow from "science doesn't rigoroulsy define what it is".
Yes, corrected.
But my point stads: claiming there is no intelligence in AI models without even knowing what "real" intelligence is, is wrong.
I think the point is more that the word "intelligence" as used in common speech is very vague.
I suppose a lot of people (certainly I do it and I expect many others do it too) will use the word "intelligence" in a general non-science setting in place of "rationalization" or "reasoning" which would be clearer terms but less well understood.
LLMs easilly produce output which is not logical, and a rational being can spot it as not following rationality (even of we don't understand why we can do logic, we can understand logic or the absence of it).
That said, so do lots of people, which makes an interesting point about lots of people not being rational, which nearly dovetails with your point about intelligence.
I would say the problem is trying to defined "inteligence" as something that includes all humans in all settings when clearly humans are perfectly capable of producing irrational shit whilst thinking of themselves as being highly intelligent whilst doing so.
I'm not sure if that's quite the point you were bringing up, but it's a pretty interesting one.