I don’t know Knuth. I understand LLMs for precisely what they are, how they’re built, the math behind them, the limits of what they’re doing, and I don’t over estimate the illusion. However while I see people over estimating them I think they’re extrapolating the current state to a state where it’s limits are restricted and augmented with other techniques and models that address their short comings. Lack of agency? We have agent techniques. Lack of consistency with reality? We have information retrieval and semantic inference systems. LLMs bring an unreasonably powerful ability to semantically interpret in a space of ambiguity and approximate enough reasoning and inference to tie together all the pieces we’ve built into an ensemble model that’s so close to AGI that it likely doesn’t matter. People look at LLMs and shake their head failing to realize it’s a single model and single technique that we haven’t even attempted to augment and fail to realize that it’s even possible to augment and constrain LLM with other techniques to address their non trivial failings.
Well you should before taking unwarranted potshots at the man. He's done more for humanity than you or I ever will, eh?
Anyway, you do sound like you know about LLMs, so apologies for that bit.
> People look at LLMs and shake their head failing to realize it’s a single model and single technique that we haven’t even attempted to augment and fail to realize that it’s even possible to augment and constrain LLM with other techniques to address their non trivial failings.
I doubt Knuth is doing that, rather I think the whole thing is orthogonal to his life's work. FWIW, I would love to know his thoughts after reading the GPT4 version of the answers to his questions, eh?
- - - - - -
> I think they’re extrapolating the current state to a state where it’s limits are restricted and [not] augmented with other techniques and models that address their short comings.
I think you might have dropped a negation in that sentence?
> Lack of agency? We have agent techniques. Lack of consistency with reality? We have information retrieval and semantic inference systems. LLMs bring an unreasonably powerful ability to semantically interpret in a space of ambiguity and approximate enough reasoning and inference to tie together all the pieces we’ve built into an ensemble model that’s so close to AGI that it likely doesn’t matter.
I agree! I've been saying for a few minutes now that we'll connect these LLMs to empirical feedback devices and they'll become scientists. Schmidhuber says his goal is "to create an automatic scientist and then retire.", eh?
(FWIW I think there are serious metaphysical ramifications of the pseudo- vs. real- AGI issue, but this isn't the forum for that.)
