New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text | Quanta Magazine
www.quantamagazine.org
Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing.

I’ve been saying this for about a year since seeing the Othello GPT research, but it’s nice to see more minds changing as the research builds up.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    You can see clearly that it has no understanding of the wordplay. Though I’ll concede it’s impressive that it got the right answer at all.

    • kromem@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      The confabulations and in general the surface statistics stuff often gets in the way of the meat and potatoes of critical reasoning in the SotA models.

      A good example of this is trying a variation of common puzzles versus changing tokens to representations and having it repeat adjectives when working through CoT.

      Often as soon as it makes a mistake and has that mistake in context, it just has no way of correcting course. A lot of my current work is related to that and using a devil’s advocate approach to self-correction.

      But in reality, we won’t see a significant jump in things like being able to identify self-ignorance until hardware shifts in the next few years.