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 thread⁂ Fish Id WardrobeSep 23, 2023

@baldur Interesting but of course "A is B" is not commutative (reversible) for all sorts of A and B. (A rose is pink; John is holding a gun.)

So even if LLMs could do this, it would still need to know when to do it.

Show threadBornachSep 23, 2023

@fishidwardrobe @baldur

And yet tech leaders seem to want to bet their businesses on #GenerativeAI systems that are unable to tell when given some fact "A is B", in which situations is it reasonable to deduce that "B is A"

Show thread⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe
@bornach @baldur Exactly
Sep 23, 2023 at 6:03pmWeb