I’ve been saying this for about a year since seeing the Othello GPT research, but it’s nice to see more minds changing as the research builds up.

Edit: Because people aren’t actually reading and just commenting based on the headline, a relevant part of the article:

New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

“[They] cannot be just mimicking what has been seen in the training data,” said Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research who was not part of the work. “That’s the basic insight.”

  • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Fun thought experiment:

    Let’s say we have a time machine and we can go back in time to a specific moment to observe how someone reacts to something.

    If that person reacts the same way every time, does that mean that by knowing what they would do, you have removed their free will?

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If you could travel back in time and observe a person over and over again react the same way is it different from observing a video tape?

      Does traveling back in time guarantee that someone would react the same way in the same situation even?

      • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        is it different from observing a video tape?

        I would think that it’s different, only because you have the potential to alter what could happen.

        Does traveling back in time guarantee that someone would react the same way in the same situation even?

        Maybe, maybe not, we’re entering the realm of Schrödinger’s cat as well as how time travel would actually work. Do we create some new branched timeline in travelling back? Do we enter an alternate universe entirely? Do we have a time machine where paradoxes are a problem? And the list can go on.