Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

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Having a confidence score isn't as useful as it seems unless you (the user) know a lot about the contents of the training set.

Think of traditional statistics. Suppose I said "80% of those sampled preferred apples to oranges, and my 95% confidence interval is within +/- 2% of that" but then I didn't tell you anything about how I collected the sample. Maybe I was talking to people at an apple pie festival? Who knows! Without more information on the sampling method, it's hard to make any kind of useful claim about a population.

This is why I remain so pessimistic about LLMs as a source of knowledge. Imagine you had a person who was raised from birth in a completely isolated lab environment and taught only how to read books, including the dictionary. They would know how all the words in those books relate to each other but know nothing of how that relates to the world. They could read the line "the killer drew his gun and aimed it at the victim" but what would they really know of it if they'd never seen a gun?

I think your last point raises the following question: how would you change your answer if you know they read all about guns and death and how one causes the other? What if they'd seen pictures of guns? And pictures of victims of guns annotated as such? What if they'd seen videos of people being shot by guns?

I mean I sort of understand what you're trying to say but in fact a great deal of knowledge we get about the world we live in, we get second hand.

There are plenty of people who've never held a gun, or had a gun aimed at them, and.. granted, you could argue they probably wouldn't read that line the same way as people who have, but that doesn't mean that the average Joe who's never been around a gun can't enjoy media that features guns.

Same thing about lots of things. For instance it's not hard for me to think of animals I've never seen with my own eyes. A koala for instance. But I've seen pictures. I assume they exist. I can tell you something about their diet. Does that mean I'm no better than an LLM when it comes to koala knowledge? Probably!

It’s more complicated to think about, but it’s still the same result. Think about the structure of a dictionary: all of the words are defined in terms of other words in the dictionary, but if you’ve never experienced reality as an embodied person then none of those words mean anything to you. They’re as meaningless as some randomly generated graph with a million vertices and a randomly chosen set of edges according to some edge distribution that matches what we might see in an English dictionary.

Bringing pictures into the mix still doesn’t add anything, because the pictures aren’t any more connected to real world experiences. Flooding a bunch of images into the mind of someone who was blind from birth (even if you connect the images to words) isn’t going to make any sense to them, so we shouldn’t expect the LLM to do any better.

Think about the experience of a growing baby, toddler, and child. This person is not having a bunch of training data blasted at them. They’re gradually learning about the world in an interactive, multi-sensory and multi-manipulative manner. The true understanding of words and concepts comes from integrating all of their senses with their own manipulations as well as feedback from their parents.

Children also are not blank slates, as is popularly claimed, but come equipped with built-in brain structures for vision, including facial recognition, voice recognition (the ability to recognize mom’s voice within a day or two of birth), universal grammar, and a program for learning motor coordination through sensory feedback.

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