this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (10 children)

While whether LLMs are intelligent or not is still hotly debated. I think the author's thoughts are very interesting.

This is crazy to me. You can read in a stream of meaningless numbers (tokens) and incidentally build a reasonably accurate model of the real things those tokens represent.

The implications are vast. We may be able to translate between languages that have never had a “Rosetta Stone”. Any animals that have a true language could have it decoded. And while an LLM that’s gotten an 8 year old’s understanding of balancing assorted items isn’t that useful, an LLM that’s got a baby whale’s grasp on whale language would be revolutionary.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (9 children)

LLMs can't do any of those things though...

If no one teaches them how to speak a dead language, they won't be able to translate it. LLMs require a vast corpus of language data to train on and, for bilingual translations, an actual Rosetta stone (usually the same work appearing in multiple languages).

This problem is obviously exacerbated quite a bit with animals, who, definitionally, speak no human language and have very different cognitive structures to humans. It is entirely unclear if their communications can even be called language at all. LLMs are not magic and cannot render into human speech something that was never speech to begin with.

The whole article is just sensationalism that doesn't begin to understand what LLMs are or what they're capable of.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Curious your thoughts about this. Not an LLM but likely using transformers in the architecture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is so funny, I know him personally; we went to school together. I'll watch it and comment later.

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