cm0002Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought
Captain Poofterthis is one of the most interesting things about Llms that i have ever read
That bit about how it turns out they aren’t actually just predicting the next word is crazy and kinda blows the whole “It’s just a fancy text auto-complete” argument out of the water IMO
VoroxpeteIt really doesn’t. You’re just describing the “fancy” part of “fancy autocomplete.” No one was ever really suggesting that they only predict the next word. If that was the case they would just be autocomplete, nothing fancy about it.
What’s being conveyed by “fancy autocomplete” is that these models ultimately operate by combining the most statistically likely elements of their dataset, with some application of random noise. More noise creates more “creative” (meaning more random, less probable) outputs. They do not actually “think” as we understand thought. This can clearly be seen in the examples given in the article, especially to do with math. The model is throwing together elements that are statistically proximate to the prompt. It’s not actually applying a structured, logical method the way humans can be taught to.
People are generally shit at understanding probabilities and even when they have a fairly strong math background tend to explain probablistic outcomes through anthropomorphism rather than doing the more difficult and “think-painy” statistical analysis that would be required to know if there was anything more to it.
I myself start to have thoughts that balatro is purposefully screwing me over or feeding me outcomes when it’s just randomness and probability as stated.
Ultimately, it’s easier (and more fun) for us to reason that way and it largely serves us better in everyday life.
But these things are entire casinos’ worth of probability and statistics in and of themselves, and the people developing them want desperately to believe that they are something more than pseudorandom probabilistic fancy autocomplete engines.
Add the difficulty of getting someone to understand how something works when their salary depends on them not understanding it to the existing inability of humans to reason probabilistically and the AGI from LLM delusion becomes near impossible to shake for some folks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this AI hype bubble yields a cult in the end.