Some Remarks on Large Language Models

If we look back at the history of mechanical machines, we see a lot of the same kind of debates happening there that we do around AI today -- comparing them to the abilities of humans or animals, arguing that "sure, this machine can do X, but humans can do Y better..." But over time, we've generally stopped doing that as we've gotten used to mechanical machines. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone compare a wheel to leg, for instance, even though both "do" the same thing, because at this point we take wheels for granted. Wheels are much more efficient at transporting objects across a surface in some circumstances, but no one's going around saying "yeah, but they will never be able to climb stairs as well" because, well, at this point we recognize that's not an actual argument we need to have. We know what wheels do and don't.

These AI machine are a fairly novel type of machine, so we don't yet really understand what arguments make sense to have and which ones are unnecessary. But I like these posts that get more into exactly what an LLM _is_, as I find them helpful in understanding better exactly what kind of machine an LLM is. They're not "intelligent" any more than any other machine is (and historically, people have sometimes ascribed intelligence, even sentience, to simple mechanical machines), but that's not so important. Exactly what we'll end up doing with these machines will be very interesting.

Having said that, I would add a note about the whole category of ontological or "nothing but" arguments - saying that an LLM is nothing but a fancy database, search engine, autocomplete or whatever. There's an element of question-begging when these statements are prefaced with "they will never lead to machine understanding because...", and beyond that, the more they are conflated with everyday technology, the more noteworthy their performance appears.

I also cannot fathom how models can develop a sense of time, or structured knowledge of the world consisting of discrete objects, even with a large dose of RLHF, if the internal representations are continuous, and layer normalised, and otherwise incapable of arriving at any hard-ish, logic-like rules? All these models seem have deep seated architectural limitations, and they are almost at the limit of the available training data. Being non-vague and positive-minded about this doesn't solve the issue. The models can write polite emails and funny reviews of Persian rags in haiku, but they are deeply unreasonable and 100% unreliable. There is hardly a solid business or social case for this stuff.