this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Lol what the fuck? We know exactly how LLMs work. It's not magic, and it's nothing like a human brain. They're literally word frequency algorithms. There's nothing special about them and I'm the opposite of threatened; I think it's absurd people who patently don't understand them are weighing on this debate disagreeing with me when it's obvious their position can best be described as ignorant.
I'm just going to leave this here.
some random article
A quote from the article, I found especially interesting.
"As a result, no one on Earth fully understands the inner workings of LLMs. Researchers are working to gain a better understanding, but this is a slow process that will take years—perhaps decades—to complete."
Quite an interesting read and I'm sure you can find some others if you want to and try hard enough.
This is a somewhat sensationalist and frankly uninteresting way to describe neural networks. Obviously it would take years of analysis to understand the weights of each individual node and what they're accomplishing (if it is even understandable in a way that would make sense to people without very advanced math degrees). But that doesn't mean we don't understand the model or what it does. We can and we do.
You have misunderstood this article if what you took from it is this:
We do understand how it works -- as an overall system. Inspecting the individual nodes is as irrelevant to understanding an LLM as cataloguing trees in a forest tells you the name of the city to which the forest is adjacent.