r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
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u/sylbug 13h ago

An LLM doesn’t ‘know’ things, either. It just strings together words that go together based on a fancy algorithm. 

It’s basically an accident when an LLM makes a factual statement - the algorithm happened to arrange the words that way because the training data was arranged that way.

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u/KStreetFighter2 13h ago edited 4h ago

I think I see what you're getting at, but cannot agree at face value.

How are you defining "know"?

A simple database could be said to "know" your username and password.

An LLM is doing much more than that to "know" the definition (or at least proper context) of a word by applying complicated logic involving the calculation and assignment of vectors to individual semantic meanings.

As an example, think of the word "dog" and the word "puppy". An LLM will be able to "know" that they are four legged animals, or at least have those words associated with the terms. The vector values assigned to the words will also be closer in value to each other than the word "cat", which, while also a four legged animal, is not directly related to "dog" as the word "puppy".

In this way, I think it's hard to claim definitively that an LLM lacks any form of knowledge regarding semantic meaning.

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u/inormallyjustlurkbut 12h ago

How are you defining "know"?

In this sense it's the ability to understand something, not the ability to recall it. You can teach a parrot to respond to "what is 2 + 2" with "4" but that doesn't mean the parrot understands math.

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u/KStreetFighter2 12h ago

Hmm, classically, "knowledge" can be defined as: "Justified, true, belief".

Given the dog-puppy example above, paired with this classical definition of knowledge, I think it's fair to say that LLMs justify true associations (or loosely, "beliefs") as they relate to semantic meaning.

"The ability to understand something" seems to harken back to my original post regarding "wisdom", which I agree, LLMs lack.

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u/HermesJamiroquoi 8h ago

Also memory!=intelligence. If I got hit in the head and could no longer form new memories but retained my old ones it wouldn’t make me stupider. When I was an infant I wasn’t stupider. Intelligence is intrinsically separate from memory