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Language Models Represent Space and Time

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Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#121

Post by haltist »

famouswaffles wrote: post #119
haltist wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why call it a world model? It's a "data" model and not actually a "world" model. World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being modeled which would include non-trivial logical relations, R(x,y), and properties, P(x). Current language models do not have such representations and fail miserably on any task that is not explicitly included in the training set (sudoku being an obvious…

>World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being No they wouldn't. There is no evidence, basically none whatsoever that logical can model reality or that general "perfect logical reasoning" is a thing that actually exists in the real world in real world relationships. None. No animal we've observed does it. Humans certainly don't do it. The only realm this idea actually seems to work…

Code is logic. LLMs are expressed with logical syntax. I recommend meditating on this fact for some time and trying to understand its implications instead of buying into the hype about LLMs being world models.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#122

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

famouswaffles wrote: post #116
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a common take but it doesn't really hold any water: computers are logic machines and all of Computer Science is based on logic; and it works just fine. Besides which, you may not hear about them in the news but pretty much all the classical, symbolic- and logic-based approaches of Good, Old-Fashioned AI are still going strong and are doing very well thank you in tasks in which statistical machine learning appr…

>computers are logic machines and all of Computer Science is based on logic; and it works just fine. Not what I mean. Logic is part of the real world. Logic is not the real world. The idea that you can use this small subset of the world to model the whole thing is what is incredibly suspect. No one has demonstrated this and there is no real reason to believe it can. >To clarify, those are all logic-based approaches t…

>> The idea that you can use this small subset of the world to model the whole thing is what is incredibly suspect. No one has demonstrated this and there is no real reason to believe it can.

I agree and I don't think there's any kind of logic that can do that, but there is also no other formal system that can, so far. I'm not sure if you are suggesting there is?

>> But you won't beat logic on problems with clear definitions and unambiguous axioms. That is very cool but that is clearly not all of reality.

Certainly not. Logic is a set of powerful formalisms that we can use to solve certain kinds of problem - it's a form of maths, like geometry or calculus. I don't think anyone expects that geometry or calculus is going to solve every problem in existence and the same goes for logic.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#123

Post by famouswaffles »

haltist wrote: post #121
famouswaffles wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being No they wouldn't. There is no evidence, basically none whatsoever that logical can model reality or that general "perfect logical reasoning" is a thing that actually exists in the real world in real world relationships. None. No animal we've observed does it. Humans certainly don't do it. The only realm this idea actually seems to work…

Code is logic. LLMs are expressed with logical syntax. I recommend meditating on this fact for some time and trying to understand its implications instead of buying into the hype about LLMs being world models.

Logic is part of the real world. Logic is not the real world. It does not scale to all of reality. This is obvious. anything without clear definitions and unambiguous axioms and it falls apart. You don't have to take my word for it.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#124

Post by esafak »

essive wrote: post #100
ilaksh wrote: post #30

One thing that is clouding this discussion is that most people are mixing up a lot of different characteristics that animals like humans have as if they were all the same thing. So for many people they don't really distinguish between things like "reasoning", "self-aware", "conscious", "alive", "sentient", "intelligent", "has world model". They also don't distinguish between different types or varying levels of cogni…

I think the term "world model" is a highly overloaded term. What does it really mean in your opinion?

Some understanding of the laws of nature, as we know it.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#125

Post by wnoise »

haltist wrote: post #121
famouswaffles wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being No they wouldn't. There is no evidence, basically none whatsoever that logical can model reality or that general "perfect logical reasoning" is a thing that actually exists in the real world in real world relationships. None. No animal we've observed does it. Humans certainly don't do it. The only realm this idea actually seems to work…

Code is logic. LLMs are expressed with logical syntax. I recommend meditating on this fact for some time and trying to understand its implications instead of buying into the hype about LLMs being world models.

LLMs aren't world models. They're linguistic models. However, with the right training database, it turns out that a good parsimonious linguistic model will have a (multiple, probably) world model as a subset, as it is so much better at compressing/predicting the textual stream.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#126

Post by ImHereToVote »

wnoise wrote: post #118
ImHereToVote wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is it about a biological neuron that sidesteps the halting problem? Is it because there is a weight and bias set to it. Someone should tell OpenAI to add weights and biases to their LLMs. That will make them make have an emotional like intuition, will it not? EDIT: Maybe if we train the ANNs to focus their training on attention based techniques. Then they will simply tire on halts and continue on other proble…

Why do you think "biological neuron"s sidestep the halting problem? People, who happen to run on biological neurons, have a sense of boredom that tries other approaches, and is also willing to eventually "give up", which aren't well captured in the standard algorithmic approaches.

Isn't that exactly how attention based neural networks work?

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#127

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

famouswaffles wrote: post #112
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gödel didn't say anything about real world phenomena. He was talking about formal languages and mathematics.

Of course. But if you truly cannot model every true statement in any formally devised system, then you are by definition going to have to reject valid rules that your logic cannot verify if you intend your system to perfectly logical.

I believe that's right but only in a deductive setting, and as long as there's a requirement for soundness. Inductive and abductive logical inference are not sound and they are very useful for real-world decision-making. But that is a developing field and there are still many unknowns there.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#128

Post by esafak »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #82
tomjakubowski wrote: post #44

LLMs have an internal temporal model and yet ChatGPT still can't explain to me what happened in Tenet

GPT4 explains it pretty clearly, I think: "Tenet" is a 2020 science fiction action-thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The story revolves around concepts of time manipulation and inversion, making it a complex narrative that can be challenging to understand on first viewing. Here's a basic summary: The protagonist (referred to as "The Protagonist", played by John David Washington) is a secret age…

That's a better explanation than I can muster.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#129

Post by xpe »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #37
xpe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Also, the paper’s use of “world model” (instead of simply “model”) doesn’t help clarify the situation.

I do not see how referring to a world model as simply a "model" could possibly provide clarity. LLM literally stands for Large Language Model, it has a 'model' in it by definition.

Fair. Yeah, the word 'model' is highly overloaded. To me, 'domain model' would work better.

Re: Language Models Represent Space and Time

#130

Post by esafak »

Sharlin wrote: post #28
corethree wrote: post #4

A lot of HNers were so adamant that the LLMs understand absolutely nothing and that these models are just predicting the next most likely word. I think with this paper it becomes clear that the adamant denial was just human bias talking. LLMs crossed a certain line here. You would think people would be amazed or in awe or react in fear at technological break through a and they often are. The weird part for LLMs was t…

It's the Chinese Room argument all over again. People hear "predicting the next token" and all they can imagine is some sort of a statistical database lookup, ignoring the fact that when you have a huge corpus of data with incredibly complex internal correlations and all that data also happens to correlate with some unknown external thing, it's almost certain that a powerful learner will end up modeling that external…

That is what a model is; a parsimonious explanation of observations that admits extrapolation.
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