I do not believe that LLMs are intelligent. That being said I have no fundamental understanding of how they work. I hear and often regurgitate things like “language prediction” but I want a more specific grasp of whats going on.

I’ve read great articles/posts about the environmental impact of LLMs, their dire economic situation, and their dumbing effects on people/companies/products. But the articles I’ve read that ask questions like “can AI think?” basically just go “well its just language and language isnt the same as thinking so no.” I haven’t been satisfied with this argument.

I guess I’m looking for something that dives deeper into that type of assertion that “LLMs are just language” with a critical lens. (I am not looking for a comprehensive lesson on technical side LLMs because I am not knowledgeable enough for that, some goldy locks zone would be great). If you guys have any resources you would recommend pls lmk thanks

  • katsura@leminal.spaceOP
    0·
    5 months ago

    thank you for the lengthy response. I have some experience with vectors but not necessarily piles of them, though maybe I do have enough of a base to do a proper deep dive.

    I think I am grasping the idea of the n-dimensional “map” of words as you describe it, and I see how the input data can be taken as a starting point on this map. I am confused when it comes to walking the map. Is this walking, i.e. the “novel” connections of the LLMs, simply mathematics dictated by the respective values/locations of the input data? or is it more complicated? I have trouble conceptualizing how just manipulating the values of the input data could lead to conversational abilities, is it that the mapping is just absurdly complex, like the vectors just have an astronomical number of dimensions?