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What can LLMs never do?

strangeloopcanon.com

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Re: What can LLMs never do?

#261

GPTs are trained on natural language. Why should it surprise anyone that it would fail at cellular automata?

Current LLM architectures have fundamental limitations, which means they can not learn some problems regardless of training.

A simple example is that they fundamentally can not balance parentheses more than half their context width.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#262
post #14

Fantastic essay. Highly recommended! I agree with all key points: * There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. * Providing an LLM with examples and step-by-step…

> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. Wordle and cellular automata are very 2D, and LLMs are fundamentally 1D. You might think "but what about Chess!" -…

Not an authority in the matter, but afaik, with position encodings (part of the Transformers architecture), they can handle dimensionality just fine. Actually some people tried to do 2D Transformers and the results were the same.

Visual transformers are gaining traction and they are 100% focus in 2d data.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#263
post #14

Fantastic essay. Highly recommended! I agree with all key points: * There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. * Providing an LLM with examples and step-by-step…

> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…

"Since there is no objective definition of AGI or test for it, there’s no basis for any meaningful speculation on what can or cannot achieve it; discussions about it are quasi-religious, not scientific."

This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception of _some_ of the basic concepts in physics. Scientific progress cannot be and is not predicated upon perfect definitions. For some reason when the topic of consciousness or AGI comes up around here, everyone commits a sort of "all or nothing" logical fallacy: absence of perfect knowledge is cast as total ignorance.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…

Arriving at a generally accepted scientific definition of AGI might be difficult, but a more achievable goal might be to arrive at a scientific way to determine something is not AGI. And while I'm not an expert in the field, I would certainly think a strong contender for relevant criteria would be an inability to process information in a way other than the one a system was explicitly programmed to, even if the new wa…

An LLM doesn't even see individual letters at all, because they get encoded into tokens before they are passed as input to the model. It doesn't make much sense to require reasoning with things that aren't even in the input as a requisite for intelligence.

That would be like an alien race that could see in an extra dimension, or see the non-visible light spectrum, presenting us with problems that we cannot even see and saying that we don't have AGI when we fail to solve them.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#265
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. In complete seriousness, can anyone can explain why LLMs are good at some tasks?

LLMs are good at tasks that don't require actual understanding of the topic. They can come up with excellent (or excellent-looking-but-wrong) answers to any question that their training corpus covers. In a gross oversimplification, the "reasoning" they do is really just parroting a weighted average (with randomness injected) of the matching training data. What they're doing doesn't really match any definition of "und…

>> quantum phenomena

You mean like the microtubles of Roger Penrose ???.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG0OpvudA10

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…

Arriving at a generally accepted scientific definition of AGI might be difficult, but a more achievable goal might be to arrive at a scientific way to determine something is not AGI. And while I'm not an expert in the field, I would certainly think a strong contender for relevant criteria would be an inability to process information in a way other than the one a system was explicitly programmed to, even if the new wa…

LLMs can’t reason but neither can the part of your brain that automatically completes the phrase “the sky is…”

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…

"Since there is no objective definition of AGI or test for it, there’s no basis for any meaningful speculation on what can or cannot achieve it; discussions about it are quasi-religious, not scientific." This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception…

Yes. That absence of perfect definition was part of why Turing came with his famous test so long ago. His original paper is a great read!

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#268
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you believe it must experience continuous time. If you had a system which clearly could reason, which could learn new tasks on its own, which didn't hallucinate any more than humans do, but it was only active for the period required for it to complete an assigned task, and was completely dormant otherwise, why would that dormant period disqualify it as AGI? I agree that such a system should pro…

I think its note worthy that humans actually fail this test... We have to go dormant for 8 hours every day.

Yes, but our brain is still working and processing information at those times as well, isn't it? Even if not in the same way as it does when we're conscious.

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one should feel comfortable arguing that AGI must be stateful and experience continuous time at least. Such that a plain old LLM is definitively not ever going to be AGI; but an LLM called in a do while true for loop might.

I don't understand why you believe it must experience continuous time. If you had a system which clearly could reason, which could learn new tasks on its own, which didn't hallucinate any more than humans do, but it was only active for the period required for it to complete an assigned task, and was completely dormant otherwise, why would that dormant period disqualify it as AGI? I agree that such a system should pro…

Active for a period is still continuous during that period.

As opposed to “active when called”. A function, being called repeatedly over a length of time is reasonably “continuous” imo

Re: What can LLMs never do?

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one should feel comfortable arguing that AGI must be stateful and experience continuous time at least. Such that a plain old LLM is definitively not ever going to be AGI; but an LLM called in a do while true for loop might.

Some good prompt-reply interactions are probably fed back in to subsequent training runs, so they're still stateful/have memory in a way, there's just a long delay.

That’s not the AGI’s state. That’s just some past information.
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