Maybe I misunderstood the OP? Idk

People sometimes act like the models can only reproduce their training data, which is what I’m saying is wrong. They do generalise.

During training the models are trained to predict the next word, but after training the network is always effectively interpolating between the training examples it has memorised. But this interpolation doesn’t happen in text space but in a very high dimensional abstract semantic representation space, a ‘concept space’.

Now imagine that you have memorised two paragraphs that occupy two points in concept space. And then you interpolate between them. This gives you a new point, potentially unseen during training, a new concept, that is in some ways analogous to the two paragraphs you memorised, but still fundamentally different, and potentially novel.

Not an ELI5, sorry. I’m an AI PhD, and I want to push back against the premises a lil bit.

Why do you assume they don’t know? Like what do you mean by “know”? Are you taking about conscious subjective experience? or consistency of output? or an internal world model?

There’s lots of evidence to indicate they are not conscious, although they can exhibit theory of mind. Eg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08708.pdf

For consistency of output and internal world models, however, their is mounting evidence to suggest convergence on a shared representation of reality. Eg this paper published 2 days ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct, although it is often repeated online for some reason.

A little evidence that comes to my mind is this paper showing models can understand rare English grammatical structures even if those structures are deliberately withheld during training: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19827

“The new book has, for lack of a better term, completely screwed over my fanfiction”

“These books live and die by their fanfiction. For the authors not to coordinate with the fanfic writers is a disgrace”

What are hoops that you chase with a stick doing to children? Demands grow to restrict kids access to hoops that you chase with a stick

No one cares

I still don’t get why no one has murdered the CEO or ExxonMobil

Expansionist?

Shadow boxing

Do you always talk down to people?

Weird dichotomy.

Protests can be entirely rational without the main motivation being recruitment.

Reactionary bullshit

What do you think the point of a protest is?

Britain is the rotting husk of a colonial empire. The people are psudo-fascist bootlickers obsessed with institutional proceduralism who think good things fundamentally cannot happen.

Hahaha

You don’t really believe that, do you?

Except for the American revolution, right? Or would you have been on the side of the loyalists?

Bro what are you doing

Isn’t this the start of blood meridian?