[andrewla]

What I'm saying is that we cannot observe deep structure. All we can observe is the surface structure. If we have access to the author or speaker we can ask clarifying questions, etc., but even that just produces more examples of surface structure.

But even here, in the Chomsky sense, LLMs clearly exhibit deep structure because they can write at length in an internally consistent manner. Importantly, early generations, GPT-2 and even GPT-3, did not definitively have this property; roughly, an object that was green at the beginning of a paragraph might not still be green at the end of the paragraph. This was strong evidence for lack of a world model.

Current LLMs do not show this behavior. We cannot prove that LLMs have a world model, in fact, their architecture seems to rule it out, but looking at it from a linguistic standpoint, they produce language in a manner as if to reflect a world view. That is, we cannot easily falsify the statement "LLMs somehow represent a world model"; and current examples of "disproving" their world view are so convoluted that even humans do not appear to (observationally) have a world view either.

I'm not making a claim as to LLMs having genuine deep structure or consciousness or anything like that. I'm claiming that we can't rule out current or future capabilities or make structural assumptions. Yes, they generalize from their training data, but unless you can make very specific claims about the kinds of things that they _cannot_ do, I can't take this statement as particularly compelling.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

I disagree on your definition of deep structure. We can indeed deep structure, that is my whole point, without it Finnegan’s Wake would be impossible to read. This really is something LLM’s cannot do, at least for now. And if you look at the paper I linked, if they had a world model they would not get confused on mathematics when we change the values of variables. So there seems to be plenty of things LLM’s cannot do.

And basically the burden of proof is on your side. As often is the case, discussions on AI start to resemble discussions centred on religion and belief in god. Your only line left here is “yes but you cannot prove LLM’s are conscious” - which I can’t, since proving that Unicorns do not exist is pretty senseless activity.

So basically I’d say LLM’s are stochastic parrots (or whatever term you want to use) until we can very definitely prove that they indeed think and have some sort of consciousness.