diff --git a/src/blog/draft_ai-is-in-the-cave.html.php b/src/blog/draft_ai-is-in-the-cave.html.php index 61e676f..143247b 100644 --- a/src/blog/draft_ai-is-in-the-cave.html.php +++ b/src/blog/draft_ai-is-in-the-cave.html.php @@ -53,10 +53,62 @@ The fact of the matter is that LLMs may seem, from a purely superficial standpoint, like a child who is slowly learning to speak. In the past few years we have seen drastic improvements as many of the tell-tale signs have been smoothed out of the algorithms. But even as they become indistinguishable from -the product of actual human work, +the product of actual human work, that does not mean that the means of arriving +at that product are the same, and thus the value of the product itself is not +the same. So we must ask ourselves: how do these LLMs work?

-

The Man Who "Learned" Chinese

+

The Man Who “Learned” Chinese

+ +

+It is not hard to find explanations on the Web that explain in a very technical +manner how these LLMs work, but for most people these explanations are as good +as a neuroscientist explaining how the brain works (which, at least for me, +would be pretty useless). Luckily, it is not necessary to know how all the +gears in an analog watch are interconnected versus the circuits in a digital +watch in order to understand the principle of an analog watch's movement is +kinetic energy and components pushing one another, whereas with the digital +watch it is electrical signals passed through logical circuit components. The +specifics do not really matter for these purposes. Therefore, for LLMs, I would +like to offer an explanation of this principle through analogy which may be +easier for people to understand. +

+ +

+Imagine there is a man who is a monolingual English speaker. Furthermore, he +has no knowledge of grammatical concepts which would allow him to think +abstractly about his language, much less any foreign language. Now let us say +you gave this man hundreds, maybe thousands, or maybe even millions of years to +look over Chinese texts. Some of them are books, fiction or non-fiction, some +are articles, some are conversations, others are instruction manuals, etc. All +sorts of texts of practically any kind. After such a long time he begins to +notice some patterns, where normally certain symbols are followed by certain +other symbols. And after all this time you begin to train him: you give him a +text in Chinese and he has to try to return the proper pattern of symbols which +ought to follow the ones you gave him. You, the one who knows Chinese, judge +whether the response makes sense, and if so you give him positive feedback +which tells him he did a good job (and will likely return similar responses for +similar prompts), and if not you give him negative feedback which tells him he +did a bad job (and will be less likely to return similar responses for similar +prompts). After all this time, you finally have trained this man to the point +where if any Chinese person were to speak with him over text prompts he could +respond as if he spoke perfect Chinese and was truly having a conversation or +writing meaningful texts. But is he? +

+ +

+If you were to actually ask this man (in English) whether he had any idea what +he was saying, he would obviously reply with a flat “Of course not,” but if you +were to ask him in Chinese I do not think any of us would doubt that he would +simply reply that he does, even though he clearly does not. The man has not +actually learned Chinese, but rather to mimic Chinese. The reason for this is +that he is not capable of doing the very thing that language is meant to do: +convey meaning. Sure, a Chinese speaker may find meaning in the texts +he writes, but that meaning is not his meaning. This language is no longer one +rational agent communicating his ideas to another rational agent, but merely a +single rational agent trying to induce a meaning into a text that wasn't +infused with meaning to begin with. +

Here be Demons