this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024

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I wish I was as bold as these authors. (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (21 children)

LLMs work differently, statistically predicting the next token (roughly equivalent to a word) based on all those that came before it, and parameters finetuned during training.

Which is what a parrot does.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (16 children)

Yeah this is the exact criticism. They recombine language pieces without really doing language. The end result looks like language, but it lacks any of the important characteristics of language such as meaning and intention.

If I say "Two plus two is four" I am communicating my belief about mathematics.

If an llm emits "two plus two is four" it is outputting a stochastically selected series of tokens linked by probabilities derived from training data. If the statement is true or false then that is accidental.

Hence, stochastic parrot.

[+] [email protected] -17 points 4 months ago (15 children)

If i train an LLM to do math, for the training data i generate a+b=cstatements, never showing it the same one twice.

It would be pointless for it to "memorize" every single question and answer it gets since it would never see that question again. The only way it would be able to generate correct answers would be if it gained a concept of what numbers are, and how the add operation operates on them to create a new number.
Rather than memorizing and parroting it would have to actually understand it in order to generate responses.

It's called generalization, it's why large amounts of data is required (if you show the same data again and again then memorizing becomes a viable strategy)

If I say "Two plus two is four" I am communicating my belief about mathematics.

Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can't we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You're both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you fine tune a LLM on math equations, odds are it won't actually learn how to reliably solve novel problems. Just the same as it won't become a subject matter expert on any topic, but it's a lot harder to write simple math that "looks, but is not, correct" than it is to waffle vaguely about a topic. The idea of a LLM creating a robust model of the semantics of the text it's trained on is, at face value, plausible; it just doesn't seem to actually happen in practice.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Prompt:

What is 183649+72961?

ChatGPT:

The sum of 183649 and 72961 is 256610.

It's trained to generate what is most plausible, but with math, the only plausible response is the correct answer (assuming it has been trained on data where that has been the case)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ChatGPT uses auxiliary models to perform certain tasks like basic math and programming. Your explanation about plausibility is simply wrong.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It has access to a python interpreter and can use that to do math, but it shows you that this is happening, and it did not when i asked it.

I asked it to do another operation, this time specifying i wanted it to use an external tool, and it did

You have access to a dictionary, that doesn't prove you're incapable of spelling simple words on your own, like goddamn people what's with the hate boners for ai around here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

It has access to a python interpreter and can use that to do math, but it shows you that this is happening, and it did not when i asked it.

That's not what I meant.

You have access to a dictionary, that doesn’t prove you’re incapable of spelling simple words on your own, like goddamn people what’s with the hate boners for ai around here

??? You just don't understand the difference between a LLM and a chat application using many different tools.

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