592
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
592 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
58144 readers
4368 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It’s closer to how you (as a person) know things than, say, how a database know things.
I still remember my childhood home phone number. You could ask me to forget it a million times I wouldn’t be able to. It’s useless information today. I just can’t stop remembering it.
No, you knowing your old phone number is closer to how a database knows things than how LLMs know things.
LLMs don't "know" information. They don't retain an individual fact, or know that something is true and something else is false (or that anything "is" at all). Everything they say is generated based on the likelihood of a word following another word based on the context that word is placed in.
You can't ask it to "forget" a piece of information because there's no "childhood phone number" in its memory. Instead there's an increased likelihood it will say your phone number as the result of someone prompting it to tell it a phone number. It doesn't "know" the information at all, it simply has become a part of the weights it uses to generate phrases.
It's the same in your brain though. There is no number in your brain. Just a set of synapses that allows a depolarization wave to propagate across neurons, via neurotransmitters released and absorbed in a narrow space.
The way the brain is built allows you to "remember" stuff, reconstruct information incompletely stored as different, unique connections in a network. But it is not "certain", we can't know if it's the absolute truth. That's why we need password databases and phone books, because our memory is not a database. It is probably worse than gpt-4
It doesn't matter that there is no literal number in your brain and that there are instead chemical/electronic impulses. There is an impulse there signifying your childhood phone number. You did (and do) know that. And other things too presumably.
While our brains are not perfectly efficient, we can and do actually store information in them. Information that we can judge as correct or incorrect; true or false; extant or nonexistent.
LLMs don't know anything and never knew anything. Their responses are mathematical models of word likelihood.
They don't understand English. They don't know what reality is like or what a phone number represents. If they get your phone number wrong, it isn't because they "misremembered" or because they're "uncertain." It's because it is literally incapable of retaining a fact. The phone number you asked it for is part of a mathematical model now, and it will return the output of that model, not the correct phone number.
Conversely, even if you get your phone number wrong, it isn't because you didn't know it. It's because memory is imperfect and degrades over time.
There no such an impulse, there is a neural network in your brain. These AI stuff were born as a simulation of human neural networks.
And your neural network cannot tell if something is true or untrue, it might remember a phone number as true even if it is not. English has literally a word for that, that you used: misremembed. It is so common...
It is true that LLMs do not know in a human way, they do not understand, they cannot tell if what they say is true. But they do retain facts. Ask who won f1 championship in 2001 to chatgpt. It knows it. I have problem remembering correctly, I need to check. Gpt-4 knows better than me that was there. No shame in that
You can indeed tell if something is true or untrue. You might be wrong, but that is quite different -- you can have internal knowledge that is right or wrong. The very word "misremembered" implies that you did (or even could) know it properly.
LLMs do not retain facts and they can and frequently do get information wrong.
Here's a good test. Choose a video game or TV show you know really well -- something a little older and somewhat complicated. Ask ChatGPT about specific plot points in the video game.
As an example, I know Final Fantasy 14 extremely well and have played it a long time. ChatGPT will confidently state facts about the game that are entirely and totally incorrect: it confuses characters, it moves plot points around. This is because it chooses what is likely to say, not what is actually correct. Indeed, it has no ability to know what is correct at all.
AI is not a simulation of human neural networks. It uses the concept of mathematical neural networks, but it is a word model, nothing more.
The free version gets things wrong a bunch. It's impressive how good GPT-4 is. Human brains are still a million times better in almost every way (they cost a few dollars of energy to operate per day, for example) but it's really hard to believe how capable the state of the art of LLMs is until you've tried it.
You're right about one thing though. Humans are able to know things, and to know when we don't know things. Current LLMs (transformer-based architecture) simply can't do that yet.
Genuinely curious how you would describe humans remembering stuff, because if I remember correctly my biology classes, it's about reinforced neural pathways that become more likely to be taken by an electrical impulse than those that are less 'travelled'. The whole notion of neural networks is right there in the name, based on how neurons work.
The difference is LLMs don't "remember" anything because they don't "know" anything. They don't know facts, English, that reality exists; they have no internal truths, simply a mathematical model of word weights. You can't ask it to forget information because it knows no information.
This is obviously quite different from asking a human to forget anything; we can identify the information in our brain, it exists there. We simply have no conscious control over our ability to remember it.
The fact that LLMs employ neural networks doesn't make them like humans or like brains at all.
I never implied they "remembered", I asked you how you interpret humans remembering since you likened it to a database, which science says it is not. Nor did I make any claims about AI knowing stuff, you inferred that by yourself. I also did not claim they possess any sort of human like traits. I honestly do not care to speculate.
The modelling statement speaks to how it came to be and the intention of programmers and serves to illustrate my point regarding the functioning of the brain.
My question remains unanswered.
I said:
Which is true. Human memory is more like a database than an LLM's "memory." You have knowledge in your brain which you can consult. There is data in a database that it can consult. While memory is not a database, in this sense they are similar. They both exist and contain information in some way that can be acted upon.
LLMs do not have any database, no memories, and contain no knowledge. They are fundamentally different from how humans know anything, and it's pretty accurate to say LLMs "know" nothing at all.
Leaving aside LLMs, the brain is not a database. there is no specific place that you can point to and say 'there resides the word for orange'. Assuming that would be the case, it would be highly inefficient to assign a spot somewhere for each bit of information (again, not talking about software here, still the brain). And if you would, then you would be able to isolate that place, cut it out, and actually induce somebody to forget the word and the notion (since we link words with meaning - say orange and you think of the fruit, colour or perhaps a carrot). If we hade a database organized into tables and say orange was a member of colours and another table, 'orange things', deleting the member 'orange' would make you not recognize that carrots nowadays are orange.
Instead, what happens - for example in those who have a stroke or those who suffer from epilepsy (a misfiring of meurons) - is that there appears a tip-of-the tongue phenomenon where they know what they want to say and can recognize notions, it's just the pathway to that specific word is interrupted and causes a miss, presumably when the brain tries to go on the path it knows it should take because it's the path taken many times for that specific notion and is prevented. But they don't lose the ability to say their phone number, they might lose the ability to say 'four' and some just resort to describing the notion - say the fruit that makes breakfast juice instead. Of course, if the damage done is high enough to wipe out a large amout of neurons, you lose larger amounts of words.
Downsides - you cannot learn stuff instantly, as you could if the brain was a database. That's why practice makes perfect. You remember your childhood phone number because you repeated it so many times that there is a strong enough link between some neurons.
Upsides - there is more learning capacity if you just relate notions and words versus, for lack of a better term, hardcoding them. Again, not talking about software here.
Also leads to some funky things like a pencil sharpener being called literally a pencil eater in Danish.
I never said the brain (or memory) was a database. I said it was more like a database than what LLMs have, which is nothing.
And human beings are more like a fungus (eukaryotes, saprophites) than an LLM is, that doesn't mean we're mushrooms.
However, the human brain is more like an LLM than a database, because the LLM was modelled after the human brain. It's also very similar in the way that nobody actually can tell precisely how it works, for some reason it just does.
Now I wouldn't worry about philosophical implications about the nature of consciousness and such, we're a long way and we'll find a way of screwing it up.
I do question why people are so vehement to always point out what we 'have' and how special we are. Nobody sane is saying LLMs are human consciousness 2.0. So why act threatened?
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.
Are we sure that this is substantially different from how our brain remembers things? We also remember by association
But our memories exist -- I can say definitively "I know my childhood phone number." It might be meaningless, but the information is stored in my head. I know it.
AI models don't know your childhood phone number, even if you tell them explicitly, even if they trained on it. Your childhood phone number becomes part of a model of word weights that makes it slightly more likely, when someone asks it for a phone number, that some digits of your childhood phone number might appear (or perhaps the entire thing!).
But the original information is lost.
You can't ask it to "forget" the phone number because it doesn't know it and never knew it. Even if it supplies literally your exact phone number, it isn't because it knew your phone number or because that information is correct. It's because that sequence of numbers is, based on its model, very likely to occur in that order.
This isn't true at all - first, we don't know things like a database knows things.
Second, they do retain individual facts in the same sort of way we know things, through relationships. The difference is, for us the Eiffel tower is a concept, and the name, appearance, and everything else about it are relationships - we can forget the name of something but remember everything else about it. They're word based, so the name is everything for them - they can't learn facts about a building then later learn the name of it and retain the facts, but they could later learn additional names for it
For example, they did experiments using some visualization tools and edited it manually. They changed the link been Eiffel tower and Paris to Rome, and the model began to believe it was in Rome. You could then ask what you'd see from the Eiffel tower, and it'd start listing landmarks like the coliseum
So you absolutely could have it erase facts - you just have to delete relationships or scramble details. It just might have unintended side effects, and no tools currently exist to do this in an automated fashion
For humans, it's much harder - our minds use layers of abstraction and aren't a unified set of info. That mean you could zap knowledge of the Eiffel tower, and we might forget about it. But then thinking about Paris, we might remember it and rebuild certain facts about it, then thinking about world fairs we might remember when it was built and by who, etc