this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Not really. Reality is mostly a social construction. If there's not an other to check and bring about meaning, there is no reality, and therefore no hallucinations. More precisely, everything is a hallucination. As we cannot cross reference reality with LLMs and it cannot correct itself to conform to our reality. It will always hallucinate and it will only coincide with our reality by chance.
I'm not conflating tokens with anything, I explicitly said they aren't an internal representation. They're state and nothing else. LLMs don't have an internal representation of reality. And they probably can't given their current way of working.
You seem pretty confident that LLMs cannot have an internal representation simply because you cannot imagine how that capability could emerge from their architecture. Yet we have the same fundamental problem with the human brain and have no problem asserting that humans are capable of internal representation. LLMs adhere to grammar rules, present information with a logical flow, express relationships between different concepts. Is this not evidence of, at the very least, an internal representation of grammar?
We take in external stimuli and peform billions of operations on them. This is internal representation. An LLM takes in external stimuli and performs billions of operations on them. But the latter is incapable of internal representation?
And I don't buy the idea that hallucinations are evidence that there is no internal representation. We hallucinate. An internal representation does not need to be "correct" to exist.
And LLMs aren't human brains, they don't even work remotely similarly. An LLM has more in common with an Excel spreadsheet than with a neuron. Read on the learning models and pattern recognition theories behind LLMs, they are explicitly designed to not function like humans. So we cannot assume that the same emergent properties exist on an LLM.
Nor can we assume that they cannot have the same emergent properties.
That's not how science works. You are the one claiming it does, you have the burden of proof to prove they have the same properties. Thus far, assuming they don't as they aren't human is the sensible rational route.
Read again. I have made no such claim, I simply scrutinized your assertions that LLMs lack any internal representations, and challenged that assertion with alternative hypotheses. You are the one that made the claim. I am perfectly comfortable with the conclusion that we simply do not know what is going on in LLMs with respect to human-like capabilities of the mind.