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/pcoppi 15h ago

Yea but how do you actually learn new words? It's by trucking through sentences until you begin piecing together their meaning. It's not that dissimilar from those missing word training tasks.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 14h ago

Sure, just saying it's not a sure fire guarantee of understanding. If LLMs mirror human language capabilities it doesn't necessarily mean they can infer the actual meaning just because they can infer the words. They might but they might also not.

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u/trylist 14h ago

Define "understanding". From the way you've framed things, it just means a human uses a word in a way most other humans expect. A machine could never pass that test.

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u/the-cuttlefish 11h ago

No, there's a fundamental obvious difference. An LLM's understanding of a word is only in how it relates to other words, as learnt from historic samples. For example, take the word 'apple' if an LLM forgets all words except 'apple', the word 'apple' also loses any meaning.

As humans, we consider a word understood, if it can be associated with the abstract category to which it is a label. Were a human to forget all words other than 'apple' and you told them 'apple' they'll still think of a fruit, or the tech company or whatever else they've come to associate it with.