I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.
LLMs are literally fundamentally incapable of understanding things. They are stochastic parrots and you've been fooled.
Look around you
Look at Skyscrapers. Rocket ships. Agriculture.
If you want to make a claim that humans are nothing more than stochastic parrots then you need to explain where all of this came from. What were we parroting?
Meanwhile all that LLMs do is parrot things that humans created
Rocket ships: volcanic eruptions show heat and explosive outbursts can fling things high, gunpowder and cannons, bellows showing air moves things.
Agriculture: forests, plains, jungle, desert oases, humans knew plants grew from seeds, grew with rain, grew near water, and grew where animals trampled them into the ground.
We need a list of all atempted ideas, all inventions and patents that were ever tried or conceived, and then we see how inventions are the same random permutations on ideas with Darwinian style survivorship as everything else; there were steel boats with multiple levels in them before skyscrapers; is the idea of a tall steel building really so magical when there were over a billion people on Earth in 1800 who could have come up with it?
My point is that humans did come up with it. Humans did not parrot it from someone or something else that showed it to us. We didn't "parrot" splitting the atom. We didn't learn how to build skyscrapers from looking at termite hills and we didn't learn to build rockets that can send a person to the moon from seeing a volcano
You are just speaking absolute drivel
Prompt: "Can you give me a URL with some novel components, please?"
DuckDuckGo LLM returns: "Sure! Here’s a fictional URL with some novel components: https://www.example-novels.com/2023/unique-tales/whimsical-j..."
An living parrot echoing "pieces of eight" cannot do this, it cannot say "pieces of <currency>" or "pieces of <valuable mineral>" even if asked to do that. The LLM training has abstracted some concept of what it means for a text pattern to be a URL and what it means for things to be "novel" and what it means to switch out the components of a URL but keep them individually valid. It can also give a reasonable answer asking for a new kind of protocol. So your position hinges on the word "stochastic" which is used as a slur to mean "the LLM isn't innovating like we do it's just a dice roll of remixing parts it was taught". But if you are arguing that makes it a "stochastic parrot" then you need to consider splitting the atom in its wider context...
> "We didn't "parrot" splitting the atom"
That's because we didn't "split the atom" in one blank-slate experiment with no surrounding context. Rutherford and team disintegrated the atom in 1914-1919 ish, they were building on the surrounding scientific work happening at that time: 1869 Johann Hittorf recognising that there was something coming in a straight line from or near the cathode of a Crookes vacuum tube, 1876 Eugen Goldstein proving they were coming from the cathode and naming them cathode rays (see: Cathode Ray Tube computer monitors), and 1897 J.J Thompson proving the rays are much lighter than the lightest known element and naming them Electrons, the first proof of sub-atomic particles existing. He proposed the model of the atom as a 'plum pudding' (concept parroting). Hey guess who JJ Thomspon was an academic advisor of? Ernest Rutherford! 1911 Rutherford discovery of the atomic nucleus. 1909 Rutherford demonstrated sub-atomic scattering and Millikan determined the charge on an electron. Eugen Goldstein also discovered the anode rays travelling the other way in the Crookes tube and that was picked up by Wilhelm Wien and it became Mass Spectrometry for identifying elements. In 1887 Heinrich Hertz was investigating the Photoelectric effect building on the work of Alexandre Becquerel, Johann Elster, Hans Geitel. Dalton's atomic theory of 1803.
Not to mention Rutherford's 1899 studies of radioactivity, following Henri Becquerel's work on Uranium, following Marie Curie's work on Radium and her suggestion of radioactivity being atoms breaking up, and Rutherford's student Frederick Soddy and his work on Radon, and Paul Villard's work on Gamma Ray emissions from Radon.
When Philipp Lenard was studying cathode rays in the 1890s he bought up all the supply of one phosphorescent material which meant Röntgen had to buy a different one to reproduce the results and bought one which responded to X-Rays as well, and that's how he discovered them - not by pure blank-sheet intelligence but by probability and randomness applied to an earlier concept.
That is, nobody taught humans to split the atom and then humans literally parotted the mechanism and did it, but you attempting to present splitting the atom as a thing which appeared out of nowhere and not remixing any existing concepts is, in your terms, absolute drivel. Literally a hundred years and more of scientists and engineers investigating the subatomic world and proposing that atoms could be split, and trying to work out what's in them by small varyations on the ideas and equipment and experiments seen before, you can just find names and names and names on Wikipedia of people working on this stuff and being inspired by others' work and remixing the concepts in it, and we all know the 'science progresses one death at a time' idea that individual people pick up what they learned and stick with it until they die, and new ideas and progress need new people to do variations on the ideas which exist.
No people didn't learn to build rockets from "seeing a volcano" but if you think there was no inspiration from fireworks, cannons, jellyfish squeezing water out to accelerate, no sudies of orbits from moons and planets, no chemistry experiments, no inspiration from thousands of years of flamethrowers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower#History no seeing explosions moving large things, you're living in a dream
Fireworks, cannons, chemistry experiments and flamethrowers are all human inventions
And yes, exactly! We studied orbits of moons and planets. We studied animals like Jellyfish. We choose to observe the world, we extracted data, we experimented, we saw what worked, refined, improved, and succeeded
LLMs are not capable of observing anything. They can only regurgitate and remix the information they are fed by humans! By us, because we can observe
An LLM trained on 100% wrong information will always return wrong information for anything you ask it.
Say you train an LLM with the knowledge that fire can burn underwater. It "thinks" that the step by step instructions for building a fire is to pile wood and then pour water on the wood. It has no conflicting information in its model. It cannot go try to build a fire this way and observe that it is wrong. It is a parrot. It repeats the information that you give it. At best it can find some relationships between data points that humans haven't realized might be related
A human could easily go attempt this, realize it doesn't work, and learn from the experience. Humans are not simply parrots. We are capable of exploring our surroundings and internalizing things without needing someone else to tell us how everything works
> That is, nobody taught humans to split the atom and then humans literally parotted the mechanism and did it, but you attempting to present splitting the atom as a thing which appeared out of nowhere and not remixing any existing concepts is, in your terms, absolute drivel
Building on the work of other humans is not parroting
You outlined the absolute genius of humanity building from first principles all the way to splitting the atom and you still think we're just parroting,
I think we disagree what parroting is entirely.
Of course, this turned out to be completely false, with advances in understanding of neural networks. Now, again with no evidence other than "we invented this thing that's, useful to us" people have been asserting that humans are just like this thing we invented. Why? What's the evidence? There never is any. It's high dorm room behavior. "What if we're all just machines, man???" And the argument is always that if I disagree with you when you assert this, then I am acting unscientifically and arguing for some kind of magic.
But there's no magic. The human brain just functions in a way different than the new shiny toys that humans have invented, in terms of ability to model an external world, in terms of the way emotions and sense experience are inseparable from our capacity to process information, in terms of consciousness. The hardware is entirely different, and we're functionally different.
The closest things to human minds are out there, and they've been out there for as long as we have: other animals. The real unscientific perspective is that to get high on your own supply and assert that some kind of fake, creepily ingratiating Spock we made up (who is far less charming than Leonard Nimony) is more like us than a chimp is.
I don’t know if there is a pithy shirt phrase to accurately describe how LLMs function. Can you give me a similar one for how humans think? That might spur my own creativity here.
I'm fairly sure I've never seen a deterministic parrot which makes me think the term is tautological.
I wouldn't claim LLMs are good at being factual, or good at arithmetic, or at drawing wine glasses, or that they are "clever". What they are very good at is responding to questions in a way which gives you the very strong impression they've understood you.
It clearly doesn't understand that the question has a correct answer, or that it does not know the answer. It also clearly does not understand that I hate bullshit, no matter how many dozens of times I prompt it to not make something up and would prefer an admittance of ignorance.
Although that isn't literally indistinguishable from 'understanding' (because your fact checking easily discerned that) it suggests that at a surface level it did appear to understand your question and knew what a plausible answer might look like. This is not necessarily useful but it's quite impressive.
Sure, LLMs are incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint. But they're so fucking stupid I hate using them.
> This is not necessarily useful but it's quite impressive.
I think we mostly agree on this. Cheers.
Rather than give you a technical answer - if I ever feel like an LLM can recognize its limitations rather than make something up, I would say it understands. In my experience LLMs are just algorithmic bullshitters. I would consider a function that just returns "I do not understand" to be an improvement, since most of the time I get confidently incorrect answers instead.
Yes, I read Anthropic's paper from a few days ago. I remain unimpressed until talking to an LLM isn't a profoundly frustrating experience.
Take two 4K frames of a falling vase, ask a model to predict the next token... I mean the following images. Your model now needs include some approximations of physics - and the ability to apply it correctly - to produce a realistic outcome. I'm not aware of any model capable of doing that, but that's what it would mean to predict the unseen with high enough fidelity.
They're quite literally being sold as a replacement for human intellectual labor by people that have received uncountable sums of investment money towards that goal.
The author of the post even says this:
"These machines will soon become the beating hearts of the society in which we live. The social and political structures they create as they compose and interact with each other will define everything we see around us."
Can't blame people "fact checking" something that's supposed to fill these shoes.
People should be (far) more critical of LLMs given all of these style of bold claims, not less.
Also, telling people they're "holding it wrong" when they interact with alleged "Ay Gee Eye" "superintelligence" really is a poor selling point, and no way to increase confidence in these offerings.
These people and these companies don't get to make these claims that threaten the livelihood of millions of people, inflate a massive bubble, impact hiring decisions and everything else we've seen and then get excused cause "whoops you're not supposed to use it like that, dummy."
Nah.
We can discuss whether LLMs live up to the hype, or we can discuss how to use this new tool in the best way. I'm really tired of HN insisting on discussing the former, and I don't want to take part in that. I'm happy to discuss the latter, though.
Hm nope, now that the web if flooded by LLM generated content it's game over. I can't tell how many times I almost got fooled by recipes &co which seem legit at first but are utter non sense. And now we're feeding that garbage back to where it came from
It expands what they had before with AI Overviews, but I’m not sure how new either of those are. It showed up for me organically as an AI Mode tab on a native Google search in Firefox ironically.
What happens if you go directly to https://google.com/aimode ?