It's a really well-trained parrot. It responds to what you say, and then it responds to what it hears itself say.
But despite knowing which sounds go together based on which sounds it heard, it doesn't actually speak English.
It's a really well-trained parrot. It responds to what you say, and then it responds to what it hears itself say.
But despite knowing which sounds go together based on which sounds it heard, it doesn't actually speak English.
I am an LLM researcher at MIT, and hopefully this will help.
As others have answered, LLMs have only learned the ability to autocomplete given some input, known as the prompt. Functionally, the model is strictly predicting the probability of the next word^+^, called tokens, with some randomness injected so the output isn’t exactly the same for any given prompt.
The probability of the next word comes from what was in the model’s training data, in combination with a very complex mathematical method to compute the impact of all previous words with every other previous word and with the new predicted word, called self-attention, but you can think of this like a computed relatedness factor.
This relatedness factor is very computationally expensive and grows exponentially, so models are limited by how many previous words can be used to compute relatedness. This limitation is called the Context Window. The recent breakthroughs in LLMs come from the use of very large context windows to learn the relationships of as many words as possible.
This process of predicting the next word is repeated iteratively until a special stop token is generated, which tells the model go stop generating more words. So literally, the models builds entire responses one word at a time from left to right.
Because all future words are predicated on the previously stated words in either the prompt or subsequent generated words, it becomes impossible to apply even the most basic logical concepts, unless all the components required are present in the prompt or have somehow serendipitously been stated by the model in its generated response.
This is also why LLMs tend to work better when you ask them to work out all the steps of a problem instead of jumping to a conclusion, and why the best models tend to rely on extremely verbose answers to give you the simple piece of information you were looking for.
From this fundamental understanding, hopefully you can now reason the LLM limitations in factual understanding as well. For instance, if a given fact was never mentioned in the training data, or an answer simply doesn’t exist, the model will make it up, inferring the next most likely word to create a plausible sounding statement. Essentially, the model has been faking language understanding so much, that even when the model has no factual basis for an answer, it can easily trick a unwitting human into believing the answer to be correct.
—-
^+^more specifically these words are tokens which usually contain some smaller part of a word. For instance, understand
and able
would be represented as two tokens that when put together would become the word understandable
.
I think that a good starting place to explain the concept to people would be to describe a Travesty Generator. I remember playing with one of those back in the 1980's. If you fed it a snippet of Shakespeare, what it churned out sounded remarkably like Shakespeare, even if it created brand "new" words.
The results were goofy, but fun because it still almost made sense.
The most disappointing source text I ever put in was TS Eliot. The output was just about as much rubbish as the original text.
As some nerd playing with various Ai models at home with no formal training, any wisdom you think that's worth sharing?
The only winning move is not to play.
But my therapist said she needs more VRam.
It's your phone's 'predictive text', but if it were trained on the internet.
It can guess what the next word should be a lot of the time, but it's also easy for it to go off the rails.
Not an ELI5, sorry. I'm an AI PhD, and I want to push back against the premises a lil bit.
Why do you assume they don't know? Like what do you mean by "know"? Are you taking about conscious subjective experience? or consistency of output? or an internal world model?
There's lots of evidence to indicate they are not conscious, although they can exhibit theory of mind. Eg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08708.pdf
For consistency of output and internal world models, however, their is mounting evidence to suggest convergence on a shared representation of reality. Eg this paper published 2 days ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987
The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn't correct, although it is often repeated online for some reason.
A little evidence that comes to my mind is this paper showing models can understand rare English grammatical structures even if those structures are deliberately withheld during training: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19827
The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn't correct
I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).
People sometimes act like the models can only reproduce their training data, which is what I'm saying is wrong. They do generalise.
During training the models are trained to predict the next word, but after training the network is always effectively interpolating between the training examples it has memorised. But this interpolation doesn't happen in text space but in a very high dimensional abstract semantic representation space, a 'concept space'.
Now imagine that you have memorised two paragraphs that occupy two points in concept space. And then you interpolate between them. This gives you a new point, potentially unseen during training, a new concept, that is in some ways analogous to the two paragraphs you memorised, but still fundamentally different, and potentially novel.
You sound like a chatbot who's offended by it's intelligence being insulted.
I really appreciate you linking studies about this topic, as finding this kind of research can be daunting. Those looks like really interesting reads.
Harry Frankfurt's influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.
When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.
When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.
But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.
The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.
You could maybe just share a meme like this one.
Some folks in the comments there share actual LLM results, a few of which are sensible but plenty that aren't far off from the joke.
LMAO! I tried it, and it said:
The man takes the goat across the river first, then he returns alone and takes the boat across again. Finally, he brings the goat's friend, Mr. Cabbage, across the river.
LMAO
I asked what if the man can't swim...
In that case, the man can still take the goat across the river first. Then, he ties the goat to the boat and pulls the boat across the river using a rope, ensuring he stays on the side of the river where he can safely manage the boat without swimming.
I asked who Mr. Cabbage is...
My apologies for the confusion! Mr. Cabbage is a playful addition. In the classic riddle, there's usually no mention of Mr. Cabbage. It's just the man, the goat, and perhaps another item or animal depending on the version of the riddle. I just added Mr. Cabbage for some extra fun!
Then I asked what some other additions could be...
Certainly! You can add various characters or items to make the riddle more entertaining. Here are a few ideas:
Mr. Wolf: The man, the goat, and Mr. Wolf need to cross the river. But if the man leaves the wolf alone with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat.
Ms. Hen: The man, the goat, and Ms. Hen need to cross the river. But if the man leaves the hen alone with the goat, the goat will eat the hen.
Professor Fox: The man, the goat, and Professor Fox need to cross the river. But if the man leaves the fox alone with the goat, the fox will eat the goat.
Princess Diamond: The man, the goat, and Princess Diamond's precious gem need to cross the river. But Princess Diamond has warned that if anyone other than herself touches the gem, they'll be cursed.
Feel free to mix and match or come up with your own additions!
And the "solution"...
Ah, that's a fun twist! Let's see:
- The man takes Mr. Cabbage across first, then returns alone.
- Next, he takes Ms. Hen across but brings Mr. Cabbage back.
- He then takes Princess Diamond's gem across, leaves it on the other side, and takes Mr. Wolf across.
- The man leaves Mr. Wolf with Ms. Hen on the other side and returns alone.
- He takes Princess Diamond across, but before he leaves, he swaps Mr. Cabbage with Princess Diamond's gem.
- The man brings Mr. Cabbage across, leaving Princess Diamond's gem with Mr. Wolf.
- Finally, he takes the goat across.
Everyone safely crosses the river without any mishaps!
I love Mr. Cabbage! Thank you CharGPT, very cool!
It's just fancy predictive text like while texting on your phone. It guesses what the next word should be for a lot more complex topics.
There’s the Chinese Room argument, which is a bit related:
I always thought the Chinese Room argument was kinda silly. It’s predicated on the idea that humans have some unique capacity to understand the world that can’t be replicated by a syntactic system, but there is no attempt made to actually define this capacity.
The whole argument depends on our intuition that we think and know things in a way inanimate objects don’t. In other words, it’s a tautology to draw the conclusion that computers can’t think from the premise that computers can’t think.
This is what I was going to point to. When I was in grad school, it was often referred to as the Symbol Gounding Problem. Basically it's a interdisciplinary research problem involving pragmatics, embodied cognition, and a bunch of others. The LLM people are now crashing into this research problem, and it's interesting to see how they react.
Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can't really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like "when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B", or "most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y". So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It's all just sounds to you. You don't recognize words and you can't even tell from context what's happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That's basically LLMs.
A 5 year old repeating daddy's swear words without knowing what it is.
That analogy is hard to come up with because the question of whether it even comprehends meaning requires first answering the unanswerable question of what meaning actually is and whether or not humans are also just spicy pattern predictors / autocompletes, since predicting patterns is like the whole point of evolving intelligence, being able to connect cause and effect in patterns and anticipate the future just helps with not starving. The line is far blurrier than most are willing to admit and ultimately hinges on our experience of sapience rather than being able to strictly define knowledge and meaning.
Instead it's far better to say that ML models are not sentient, they are like a very big brain that's switched off, but we can access it by stimulating it with a prompt.
Interesting thoughts! Now that I think about this, we as humans have a huge advantage by having not only language, but also sight, smell, hearing and taste. An LLM basically only has "language." We might not realize how much meaning we create through those other senses.
To add to this insight, there are many recent publications showing the dramatic improvements of adding another modality like vision to language models.
While this is my conjecture that is loosely supported by existing research, I personally believe that multimodality is the secret to understanding human intelligence.
The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around.
I see the people you talk to aren't familiar with politicians?
Imagine that you have a random group of people waiting in line at your desk. You have each one read the prompt, and the response so far, and then add a word themself. Then they leave and the next person in line comes and does it.
This is why "why did you say ?" questions are nonsensical to AI. The code answering it is not the code that wrote it and there is no communication coordination or anything between the different word answerers.
Imagine making a whole chicken out of chicken-nugget goo.
It will look like a roast chicken. It will taste alarmingly like chicken. It absolutely will not be a roast chicken.
The sad thing is that humans do a hell of a lot of this, a hell of a lot of the time. Look how well a highschooler who hasn't actually read the book can churn out a book report. Flick through, soak up the flavour and texture of the thing, read the blurb on the back to see what it's about, keep in mind the bloated over-flowery language that teachers expect, and you can bullshit your way to an A.
Only problem is, you can't use the results for anything productive, which is what people try to use GenAI for.
It's all just fancy statistics. It turns words into numbers. Then it finds patterns in those numbers. When you enter a prompt, it finds numbers that are similar and spits out an answer.
You can get into vectors and back propagation and blah blah blah but essentially it's a math formula. We call it AI but it's not fundamentally different than solving 2x + 4 = 10 for x.
x = 3
Compression algorithms can reduce most written text to about 20–25% of its original size—implying that that’s the amount of actual unique information it contains, while the rest is predictable filler.
Empirical studies have found that chimps and human infants, when looking at test patterns, will ignore patterns that are too predictable or too unpredictable—with the sweet spot for maximizing attention being patterns that are about 80% predictable.
AI researchers have found that generating new text by predicting the most likely continuation of the given input results in text that sounds monotonous and obviously robotic. Through trial and error, they found that, instead of choosing the most likely result, choosing one with around an 80% likelihood threshold produces results judged most interesting and human-like.
The point being: AI has stumbled on a method of mimicking the presence of meaning by imitating the ratio of novelty to predictability that characterizes real human thought. But we know that the actual content of that novelty is randomly chosen, rather than being a deliberate message.
All of this also touches upon an interesting topic. What it really means to understand something? Just because you know stuff and may even be able to apply it in flexible ways, does that count as understanding? I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t even know how to approach something like this.
Anyway, I think the main difference is the lack of personal experience about the real world. With LLMs, it’s all second hand knowledge. A human could memorize facts like how water circulates between rivers, lakes and clouds, and all of that information would be linked to personal experiences, which would shape the answer in many ways. An LLM doesn’t have such experiences.
Another thing would be reflecting on your experiences and knowledge. LLMs do none of that. They just speak whatever “pops in their mind”, whereas humans usually think before speaking… Well at least we are capable of doing that even though we may not always take advantage of this super power. Although, the output of an LLM can be monitored and abruptly deleted as soon as it crosses some line. It’s sort of like mimicking the thought processes you have inside your head before opening your mouth.
Example: Explain what it feels like to have an MRI taken of your head. If you haven’t actually experienced that yourself, you’ll have to rely on second hand information. In that case, the explanation will probably be a bit flimsy. Imagine you also read all the books, blog posts and and reddit comments about it, and you’re able to reconstruct a fancy explanation regardless.
This lack of experience may hurt the explanation a bit, but an LLM doesn’t have any experiences of anything in the real world. It has only second hand descriptions of all those experiences, and that will severely hurt all explanations and reasoning.
I feel like you're already not getting it and therefore giving too much credit to the LLM.
With LLMs it's not even about second hand knowledge, the concept of knowledge does not apply to LLMs at all, it's literally just about statistics, eg. what is the most likely next output after this token.
After reading some of the comments and pondering this question myself, I think I may have thought of a good analogy that atleast helps me (even though I know fairly well how LLM's work)
An LLM is like a car on the road. It can follow all the rules, like breaking in front of a red light, turning, signaling etc. However, a car has NO understanding of any of the traffic rules it follows.
A car can even break those rules, even if its behaviour is intended (if you push the gas pedal at a red light, the car is not in the wrong because it doesn't KNOW the rules, it just acts on it).
Why this works for me is that when I give examples of human behaviour or animal behaviour, I automatically ascribe some sort of consciousness. An LLM has no conscious (as far as I know for now). This idea is exactly what I want to convey. If I think of a car and rules, it is obvious to me that a car has no concept of rules, but still is part of those rules somehow.
Thing is a conscience (and any emotions, and feelings in general) is just chemicals affecting electrical signals in the brain... If a ML model such as an LLM uses parameters to affect electrical signals through its nodes then is it on us to say it can't have a conscience, or feel happy or sad, or even pain?
Sure the inputs and outputs are different, but when you have "real" inputs it's possible that the training data for "weather = rain" is more downbeat than "weather = sun" so is it reasonable to say that the model gets depressed when it's raining?
The weightings will change leading to a a change in the electrical signals, which emulates pretty closely what happens in our heads
The short hand answer I’d try to give people is ‘it’s statistics’. Based on training data, there’s a certain chance of certain words being in proximity of each other. There’s no reasoning behind placement, other than whatever pattern is discernible from known situation.
It's like your 5 year old daughter, relaying to you what she made of something she heard earlier.
That's my analogy. ChatGPT kind of has the intellect and ability to differentiate between facts and fiction of a 5 year old. But it combines that with the writing style of a 40 year old with a uncanny love of mixing adjectives and sounding condescending.
Like a kid trying very hard to sound like everyone else. "Eloquent bullshit generator"
have you played that game where everyone write a subjet and put it on a stack of paper, then everyone puts a verb on a different stack of paper, then everyone put an object on a third stack of paper, and you can even add a place or whatever on the next stack of paper. You end-up with fun sentences like A cat eat Kevin's brain on the beach. It's the kind of stuff (pre-)teen do to have a good laugh.
Chat GPT somehow works the same way, except that instead of having 10 paper in 5 stack, it has millions of paper in thousands of stack and depending on the "context" will choose which stack it draws paper from (To take an ELI5 analogy)
Someone once described is as T9 on steroids. It's like your mobile keyboard suggesting follow up words, just a lot more complex in size.
If an AI says something malicious, our brain immediatly jumps to "it has intent". How can we explain this away?
The more you understand the underlying concept of LLMs, the more the magic fades away. LLMs are certainly cool and can be fun but the hype around them seems very artificial and they're certainly not what I'd describe as "AI". To me, an AI would be something that actually has some form of consciousness, something that actually can form its own thoughts and learn things on its own through observation or experimentation. LLMs can't do any of those things. They're static and always wait for your input to even do anything. For text generation you can even just regenerate an answer to the same previous text and the replies can and will vary greatly. If they say something mean or malicious, it's simply because it is based on whatever they were trained on and whatever parameters they are following (like if you told them to roleplay a mean person).
So there's two different things to what you are asking.
(1) They don't know what (i.e. semantically) they are talking about.
This is probably not the case, and there's very good evidence over the past year in research papers and replicated projects that transformer models do pick up world models from the training data such that they are aware and integrating things at a more conceptual level.
For example, even a small toy GPT model trained only on chess moves builds an internal structure of the whole board and tracks "my pieces" and "opponent pieces."
(2) Why do they say dumb shit that's clearly wrong and don't know.
They aren't knowledge memorizers. They are very advanced pattern extenders.
Where the answer to a question is part of the pattern they can successfully extend, they get the answer correct. But if it isn't, they confabulate an answer in a similar way to stroke patients who don't know that they don't know the answer to something and make it up as they go along. Similar to stroke patients, you can even detect when this is happening with a similar approach (ask 10x and see how consistent the answer is or if it changes each time).
They aren't memorizing the information like a database. They are building ways to extend input into output in ways that match as much information as they can be fed. In this, they are beyond exceptional. But they've been kind of shoehorned into the initial tech demo usecase of "knowledgeable chatbot" which is a less than ideal use. The fact they were even good at information recall was a surprise to most researchers.
Part of the problem is hyperactive agency detection - the same biological bug/feature that fuels belief in the divine.
If a twig snaps, it could be nothing or someone. If it's nothing and we react as if it was someone, no biggie. If it was someone and we react as if it was nothing, potential biggie. So our brains are bias towards assuming agency where there is none, to keep us alive.
The way I've explained it before is that it's like the autocomplete on your phone. Your phone doesn't know what you're going to write, but it can predict that after word A, it is likelly word B will appear, so it suggests it. LLMs are just the same as that, but much more powerful and trained on the writing of thousands of people. The LLM predicts that after prompt X the most likelly set of characters to follow it is set Y. No comprehension required, just prediction based on previous data.
So it's like a politician?
Some options:
It's just a better Siri, still just as soulless.
If you think they would understand the Chinese room experiment.
Imagine the computer playing mad libs with itself and it picks the least funniest answers to present.
Imagine if you tore every page out of every book in the library (about the things you mentioned) shuffled them and try to handout the first page that mostly makes sense to the last page given, now think about that with just letters.
Demonstration of its capacity to make mistakes, esp continuity errors.
The Chinese Room experiment is great! Thanks for reminding me about that :).
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