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Comment by aspenmartin | Hacker News Reader

They do learn in context, and very sample efficiently. Continual learning is active area of research and we sort of already have something resembling it with persistent context. So yes they do learn.

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I consider that to be the illusion of learning. You are not wrong, I think they may actually learn in the future though. But not today.

That’s strange to me, what would you define as learning?

To acquire new knowledge and build your understanding. They don’t understand so they can’t learn

Thank you for saying succinctly what I could not. If your consciousness and knowledge fundamentally does not change from your ongoing experience, then you are not learning. This is how the LLM currently functions.

You’re describing the problem of continual learning. As I said their “consciousness” for lack of a better term and knowledge does already change from ongoing experience in context which is another of saying for only a short window, today. They are ephemeral, sort of, but that’s a temporary limitation.

I think if your definition of consciousness can fit these things then you’re more open minded than I care to be. Consciousness isn’t really guessing the next thing to say- it’s hard to say what it is, obviously, but blindly feeling forwards with each new conversation doesn’t seem like consciousness or learning to me.

We aren't talking about consciousness, we're talking about learning.

> Consciousness isn’t really guessing the next thing to say-

I don't know what consciousness is either and these debates are a dumpster fire when they happen, but it sounds like you're pulling forward this "LLMs are just predicting the next token" (true by construction) implies that they can't learn or reason or be conscious (2/3 are wrong, the last one isn't falsifiable without a useful definition).

Yes, I think we simply disagree. I think you know what LLMs are based on our other thread and if you think something important happens when you get a large enough context vector I don’t think there’s much I can say to change your mind. It seems unlikely to me!

“They don’t understand” is a strong statement, maybe true but depends on what you mean by understand. What is your definition of this? I can’t think of a meaningful definition of “understand” that doesn’t apply to LLMs

We’re in all the same threads lately!

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