How exactly can there be "truthfulness" in humans, say? After all, if a human was taught in school all his life that the capital of Connecticut is Moscow...
The situation you described is possible, but would require something like a subverting effort of propaganda by the state.
Inferring truth about a social event in a social situation, for example, requires a nuanced set of thought processes and attention mechanisms.
If we had a swarm of LLMs collecting a variety of data from a variety of disparate sources, where the swarm communicates for consensus, it would be very hard to convince them that Moscow is in Connecticut.
Unfortunately we are still stuck in monolithic training run land.
Also, given the lack of imagination everyone has with naming places, I had to check:
This last bit is not a great thing though, as LLMs don't have the direct experience needed to correct factual errors about the external world. Unfortunately we care about the external world, and want them to make accurate statements about it.
It would be possible for LLMs to see inconsistencies across or within sources, and try to resolve those. If perfect, then this would result in a self-consistent description of some world, it just wouldn't necessarily be ours.
I do think it is an extremely inefficient way to have a swarm (e.g. across time through training data) and it would make more sense to solve the pretraining problem (to connect them to the external world as you pointed out) and actually have multiple LLMs in a swarm at the same time.
> The situation you described is possible, but would require something like a subverting effort of propaganda by the state.
Great! LLMs are fed from the same swarm.
> If you pretrained an LLM with data saying Moscow is the capital of Connecticut it would think that is true.
> Well so would a human!
But humans aren't static weights, we update continuously, and we arrive at consensus via communication as we all experience different perspectives. You can fool an entire group through propaganda, but there are boundless historical examples of information making its way in through human communication to overcome said propaganda.
Continual/online learning is still an area of active research.
It's valid to take either position, that both can be aware of truth or that neither can be, and there has been a lot of philosophical debate about this specific topic with humans since well before even mechanical computers were invented.
Plato's cave comes to mind.
And it's not for a lack of trying. Logic cannot even handle Narrow Intelligence that deals with parsing the real world (Speech/Image Recognition, Classification, Detection etc). But those are flawed and mis-predict so why build them ? Because they are immensely useful, flaws or no.
Having deeply flawed machines in the sense that they perform their tasks regularly poorly seems like an odd choice to pursue.
>Having deeply flawed machines in the sense that they perform their tasks regularly poorly seems like an odd choice to pursue.
State of the art ANNs are generally mostly right though. Even LLMs are mostly right, that's why hallucinations are particularly annoying.
People do seem to have higher standards for machines but you can't eat your cake and have it. You can't call what you do reasoning and turn around and call the same thing something else because of preconceived notions of what "true" reasoning should be.
That is to say, to our best knowledge humans have no purely logical way of knowing truth ourselves. Human truth seems intrinsically connected to humanity and lived experience with logic being a minor offshoot