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by Legend2440 3 hours ago
I think this article pushes the premise farther than is reasonable.

The best anyone expects from an LLM "truth vector" is that it would encode the model's belief about whether the statement is true. Of course a perfect truth oracle is impossible.

2 comments

> The best anyone expects from an LLM "truth vector" is that it would encode the model's belief about whether the statement is true.

I think even that's too-optimistic: The model is a document-extender, so its baseline "truth" is whether a token seems like it would would fit-next in a partial document, based on prior documents. (This is usually not the kind of analytic truth we're interested in.)

So if we peek at vectors and weights, what we'll probably end up measuring is different, like the mood and tone of earnestness and conviction for whatever tokens are about to get emitted next. That may mean dialogue for a fictional AI Assistant character, a narrator, or an impersonal memo conclusion paragraph.

Is that the what we really want? Well, if our document described the character as Yoda, then The Force connecting all existence ends up truthy. Using "a really gullible person" can repeat anything you supply as truthy. Even if we set things up as "a respected encyclopedia article" or "a relentlessly logical super-genius"... we're not enforcing logic, but truthiness. [0]

In other words, we can't peek at ideas that require a kind of mind that isn't already there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

If anything, the whole vector space is the LLM's truth.
LLMs are not optimized only for truth they are optimized for a more complicated objective that includes e.g. humans liking their output. It is a universal truth that to get humans to like you, you have to lie to them.
<It is a universal truth that to get humans to like you, you have to lie to them.>

You don't represent all of us buddy. Some of us love truth above all else.

Not many though
> It is a universal truth that to get humans to like you, you have to lie to them.

Thus said HAL9000