Baldur BjarnasonSep 23, 2023

“Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models”

Like I’ve been saying for a while now: LLMs do not think or reason. They are not on the path to AGI. They are extremely limited correlation and text synthesis machines. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/elegant-and-powerful-new-result-that

Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models

Wowed by a new paper I just read and wish I had thought to write myself. Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no:

Marcus on AI
Show threadRobert ThauSep 23, 2023
@baldur I personally suffer the "reversal curse" when trying to recall names, sometimes quite well-known ones -- having to consciously cycle through a bunch of prompts before finding one that brings one up; this would be even stronger for obscure ones in the paper's examples (non-famous parents of famous people). Would the authors argue on that basis that I'm not sentient? And if not, what have they proved?
Show threadScott D. Strader 😐

@rst @baldur Yep. Just recently I couldn't remember everyone who was in Monty Python, yet given their names I would immediately know the reverse. Same is true when learning a language: I can often read a word and know its meaning but am unable to remember it when trying to write or speak.

Another title for the paper: "LLMs More Human Than We Thought"

Sep 23, 2023 at 2:41pmWeb
Show threadBornachSep 23, 2023

@sstrader @rst @baldur

To avoid the issue of famous vs non-famous bias the authors of the paper
https://owainevans.github.io/reversal_curse.pdf
fine-tuned a LLM using fictitious training data and showed it couldn't generalize the information

Humans might fail to recall info but not consistently always in one direction like a Large Language Model