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Comment by nyeah | Hacker News Reader

In fact LLMs are trained to predict the next token in the training set. Of course sometimes a new text input doesn't match the training set, or it matches two or more places in the training set. LLMs use a neural network to interpolate, so that's fine. Please look this up if you have any doubts.

Ok. Now. I think you're adding something to the description above. Maybe what you're describing is something "emergent," or maybe it's basically just word vectors that were built in on purpose. You may be adding something correct, or something incorrect. Fine.

But it's not reasonable to say that the "reductive" description above is a "lie". It's not. It's more like a recipe. If you look at correct instructions for making steak, and you call the author a "liar" then you are missing something important.

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>LLMs use a neural network to interpolate

"interpolate" in what vector space, pray tell? What does "interpolate" even mean, when I prompt it "write me a story about a sentient banana in the style of Hemingway and oh make it a commentary on class consciousness"? You can't assemble such a thing by cutting and pasting pieces of other text. That kind of "interpolation" has to happen at the semantic level - ipso facto, there is a semantic level.

Not to mention that no, they don't predict the next token in the training set. Give any LLM the first paragraph of any Wikipedia article - almost certainly in the training set, and uniquely so - and it won't predict the next word correctly, a lot of the time. But it will predict a word that is grammatically correct, stylistically apropos, and most likely factually correct. So what's it really doing, hm?

LLMs aren't even large enough to contain their training data - not even remotely close. It can't "stitch together things it saw" because it doesn't remember them. It only remembers the ideas used to construct them. The learned abstraction is the entire point of the exercise. LLMs would be useless if they were overfit the way you say they are.

>>Give any LLM the first paragraph of any Wikipedia article - almost certainly in the training set, and uniquely so - and it won't predict the next word correctly, a lot of the time. But it will predict a word that is grammatically correct, stylistically apropos, and most likely factually correct. So what's it really doing, hm?

you are grossly negligent of LLMs are created. I would highly recommend reading about post training, RLHF, alignment etc. First pass of training is literally "predict the next token". That's it. The first pass is also known as pre training. There's a shit ton of work (instructions, tool use, and reasoning etc) that's done afterwards because the pre-trained is model is useless. if you have some free time, I'd recommend doing this course - https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/post-training-of-llms

I guess we should declare victory. You've acknowledged how LLMs actually work.

Ah, OK. I called her a liar not because of a dispute over what exactly transformers are doing inside, but because in TFA we see:

> What are the most common misconceptions about the “stochastic parrots” metaphor?

Bender: I think one of the biggest ones is, “Bender says AI is a stochastic parrot.”

But in the paper itself we see her say exactly that, several times. What she's trying to do now is wordsmith out of it by claiming that in her world LLMs are totally unrelated to AI, so when she said LLMs are stochastic parrots she wasn't making a claim about AI.

Nobody else defines AI to exclude LLMs, nor did they at the time, and it wasn't the core of the argument she made either. But then she admits that the paper does "generalize towards AI" at the end. So... whatever.

It's morally important to reject this stuff. When academics play word games it devalues all institutional output.

I see. Ok.

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