[michaelmrose]

I know these aren't your words but do you think that there is any reason to believe there is any such thing as cosmetic vs foundational for something which has no interior life or consistent world model?

Feels like unwarranted anthropomorphizing.

[recursivecaveat]

I don't think its anthropomorphizing. A car is foundationally slow if it has a weak engine. Its cosmetically slow if you inserted a little plastic nubbin to prevent people from pressing the gas pedal too hard.

[lelanthran]

That's a good analogy but would be better if reversed.

"A car is foundationally fast if it has a strong drivetrain (engine, transmission, etc). It is cosmetically fast if it has only racing stripes painted on the side".

A better pair of words might be "structural" and "superficial". A car/llm might be structurally fast/good-aligned. It might, however, be superficially fast/good-aligned.

[retsibsi]

> do you think that there is any reason to believe there is any such thing as cosmetic vs foundational

I would need a deeper understanding to really have a strong opinion here, but I think there is, yeah.

Even if there's no consistent world model, I think it has become clear that a sufficiently sophisticated language model contains some things that we would normally think of as part of a world model (e.g. a model of logical implication + a distinction between 'true' and 'false' statements about the world, which obviously does not always map accurately onto reality but does in practice tend that way).

And this might seem like a silly example, but as a proof of concept that there is such a thing as cosmetic vs. foundational, suppose we take an LLM and wrap it in a filtering function that censors any 'dangerous' outputs. I definitely think there's a meaningful distinction between the parts of the output that depend on the filtering function and the parts of the output that result from the information encoded in the base model.