[throwthrowuknow]

What is your definition of understanding?

Please show me where the training data exists in the model to perform this lookup operation you’re supposing. If it’s that easy I’m sure you could reimplement it with a simple vector database.

Your last two paragraphs are just dualism in disguise.

[Etherlord87]

I'm far from being an expert on AI models, but it seems you lack the basic understanding of how these models work. They transform data EXACTLY like spreadsheets do. You can implement those models in Excel, assuming there's no row or column limit (or that it's high enough) - of course it will be much slower than the real implementations, but OP is right - LLMs are basically spreadsheets.

Question is, wouldn't a brain qualify as a spreadsheet, do we know it can't be implemented as one? Well, maybe not, I'm not an expert on spreadsheets either, but I think spreadsheets don't allow you circular references, and brain does, you can have feedback loops in the brain. So even if the brain doesn't have something still not understood by us, that OP suggests, it still is more powerful than AI.

BTW, this is one explanation on why AI fails at some tasks: ask AI if two words rhyme and it will be quite reliable on that. But ask it to give you word pairs that rhyme, and it will fail, because it won't run an internal loop trying some words and checking if they succeed to rhyme or not. If some AI actually succeeds at rhyming, it would do so either because it's trained to contain such word pairs from the get-go or because it's implemented to have multiple passes or something...

[throwthrowuknow]

You can implement Doom in a spreadsheet too, so what? That wasn’t the point op or I were making. If you bother to read the sentence before op talks about spreadsheets they are making the conjecture that LLMs are lookup tables operating on the corpus they were trained on. That is the aspect of spreadsheets they were comparing them to, not the fact that spreadsheets can be used to implement anything that any other programming language can. Might as well say they are basically just arrays with some functions in between, yeah no shit.

Which LLMs can’t produce rhyming pairs? Both the current ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 seem to be able to generate as many as I ask for. Was this a failure mode at some point?

[lossolo]

> Which LLMs can’t produce rhyming pairs? Both the current ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 seem to be able to generate as many as I ask for

Only in english. If they would understand language and rhymes they would do it in every other language it knows, It can't in my language while it can speak in it fluently. It just fails. And fails in so many other areas, I'm using LLMs daily for work and other stuff and if you use them long enough you will see that they are statistical machines not intelligent entities.

[singron]

People are confusing the limited computational model of a transformer with the "Chinese room argument", which leads to unproductive simultaneous debates of computational theory and philosophy.

[SomeCallMeTim]

I'm not confusing anything. I'm familiar with the Chinese Room Argument and I know how LLMs work.

What I'm saying is arguably philosophically related, in that I'm saying the LLM's model is analogous to the "response book" in the room. It doesn't matter how big the book is; if the book never changes, then no learning can happen. If no learning can happen, then understanding, a process that necessarily involves active reflection on a topic, can exist.

You simply can't say a book "understands" anything. To understand is to contemplate and mentally model a topic to the point where you can simulate it, at least at a high level. It's dynamic.

An LLM is static. It can simulate a dynamic response by having multiple stages that dig through an multiple insanely large books of instructions that cross reference each other and that involve calculations and bookmarks and such to come up with a result--but the books never change as part of the conversation.

[lossolo]

Transformer is not a simple vector database doing simple lookup operation. It's doing lookup operation on a pattern, not a word. It learns patterns from the dataset. If your pattern is not there it will hallucinate or give you the wrong answer like GPT4 and Opus gave me hundreds of times already.