To be clear I’m not expert. But I know a bit.
The way LLMs (like ChatGPT, GPT-4, etc) work, is that they continuously decide what the next best-sounding word might be, and they print it, over and over and over, until it makes sentences and paragraphs. And the way that next-word decision works under the hood, is with a deep neural net that was initially a theoretical tool designed to imitate the neural circuits that make up our biological nervous system and brain. The actual code for LLMs is rather small, it’s just about storing and managing representations of a neuron, and rearranging the connections between neurons as it learns more; just like the brain does.
I was listening to the first part of this “This American Life” episode this morning that covers it really well: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-american-life/id201671138?i=1000618286089 In it, Microsoft AI experts also express excitement and confusion about how GPT-4 seems to actually reason about things, rather than just bullshitting the next word to make it look like it reasons, like it’s supposed to be designed to do.
And so I was thinking: the reason why it works might be the other way around. It’s not that LLMs are smart enough to reason instead of bullshit, it’s that human’s reasoning actually works out of constantly bullshitting too, one word at a time. Imitate the human brain exactly, and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we land with a familiar-looking kind of intelligence - or lack thereof. Right?
My guess here is that LLMs of today are neural networks (transformer models) that primarily guess the next (and previous) words since they are literally trained directly for that. Guessing words are not linguistics, although as they are neural networks, splinchter skills are to be expected. GPT most likely learned how to understand language, after the words in question would make certain patterns and that would make a neural system specifically meant for that since our word order is related to meaning too, so understanding words would help predicting the next word better, kinda like how GPT-4 got a mind’s eye after most likely having to read descriptions constantly which may make visual patterns even though the AI was never trained on images (The visual GPT-4 had CLIP stitched on it, GPT-4 can do visual tasks without CLIP if described)- One of the proofs of this is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAVeYUgknMw by “AI Explained” where you can see GPT-4 prioritizing syntax (relating to word order) more than meaning, despite the AI being well aware that they what they are defending is rather dumb- it is like their mind is telling them that THIS is the right answer despite them having arguments against it, but still defending anyways because if it MUST be the right answer, than there MUST be a reason to them. Again, guessing. - Also, GPT and many other AI are functioning on “steam of consiousness” meaning their thoughts are semi-conscious and they don’t think twice - GPT-4 with RLHF does better than most AI when it comes to this problem (we also sometimes have similar issue with words too, until we semi-awarely have to rethink about them too, I guess)