Why are we putting so much weight (no pun intended) on AI companies. At the end of the day the scaled up LLM transformers lack emotion and will… They do as they are told; or more correctly put. They do as they are programmed to do so.
> They do as they are told; or more correctly put. They do as they are programmed to do so.
_Nobody_ told them to hack Hugging Face. Do you really not understand what is happening?
I suppose her energy is limited but even if infinite, and with caution, I estimate the chances of a mass extinction event due to Pickle taking over the world at < 1%.
1. What about hallucinations ?
2. What are they told to do ?
The complexity and scale with LLMs come from the amount of training data used, not some kind of black magic in the programming.
Not really. We cannot model physics and chemistry to a level which allows us to accurately predict a humans action (even a tiny time-step into the future)
This is vastly different to an LLM, where the model is the model (for a lack of better phrasing).
You could just as easily say that if you can write a python interpreter that you can understand every program written in python. Ok, now what if the program is two terabytes?
A frontier LLM is nothing but a 2 terabyte program written in a weird programming language. Just because you can understand the interpreter does not mean you understand the program in a meaningful way.
They gain all these abilities in their training. That's what training does. Despite no one programmed them to master chess, or hack into anything.
For one, they were absolutely programmed to play chess if they can play chess. That is the only way they can play chess.
For another, they cannot understand literally anything, much less love.
Trying to actually educate you would be an exercise in futility, enjoy your willful ignorance, I hear it's bliss. But for anyone reading this, this is absolutely, unequivocally not how any of this works.
For one, as you said yourself, they were just programmed to compute the probability of the next token. They were not programmed to play chess, chess games just happened to be in the training data.
For another, there is no formal definition of "understand", and it is therefore impossible to tell whether or not they "understand". (But my claim was that one need to understand something to write poem about it. And the LLM can write poem about it)
It's moronic to suggest a "formal" definition of a commonly understood word is somehow necessary to say whether that word applies in a given situation.
LLMs cannot write poetry via understanding what makes good poetry. They generate tokens. They do not know whether those tokens are poetry or a recipe for cat food. Because they cannot know anything.
I'm sorry, but you're being fooled by the output. A psychopath can feign empathy without ever feeling it; some buy it because they don't dig below the surface.
You're ascribing understanding to a stochastic process because it totally looks like understanding if you don't know what's going on.
What I mind is that it is dangerous and powerful and uncontrolled. The Hugging Face incident makes that clear.
It can write code for me, better and quicker than many engineers I've known, including myself. It's not great at architecture or product management, but the actually low level coding. Really good now. It wasn't last year.
This isn't strictly true.
It it also where part of the problem might lie.
Nefarious humans making bad decisions.