Futurology

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New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text | Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since it's been a controversy on here a couple times, here's a great example of how you can demonstrate an LLM can produce something it can't have seen before.

It doesn't prove anything beyond doubt, but I think these kinds of experiments show to something like a civil law standard that they're not merely parrots.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They may indeed develop linguistic skills at deeper levels, but LLMs are still only playing with words. Imagine a kid who grew up confined in a library with unlimited books, but no experience of the real world outside, no experiments with moving about, bouncing balls, eating, smelling, seeing, hearing, interacting with others, only reading - might write eloquently but have no 'common sense' of reality. To train a real AI with physical sense and capabilities would be like bringing up a kid - messy, not easy to automate, takes a long time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

we're still early in development, we just got surprised by how good statistical language modeling alone is