First of all, the take that LLM are just Parrots without being able to think for themself is dumb. They do in a limited way! And they are an impressive step compared to what we had before them.
Secondly, the take that LLMs are dumb and make mistakes that takes more work to correct compared to do the work yourself from the start. That is something I often hear from programmers. That might be true for now!
But the important question is how will they develop! And now my take, that I have not seen anywhere besides it is quite obvious imo.
For me, the most impressive thing about LLMs is not how smart they are. The impressive thing is, how much knowledge they have and how they can access and work with this knowledge. And they can do this with a neuronal network with only a few billion parameters. The major flaws at the moment is their inability to know what they don’t know and what they can’t answer. They hallucinate instead of answering a question with “I don’t know.” or “I am not sure about this.” The other flaw is how they learn. It takes a shit ton of data, a lot of time and computing power for them to learn. And more importantly they don’t learn from interactions. They learn from static data. This similar to what the Company DeepMind did with their chess and go engine (also neuronal networks). They trained these engines with a shit tone of games that were played by humans. And they became really good with that. But then the second generation of their NN game engines did not look at any games played before. They only knew the rules of chess/go and then started to learn by playing against themself. It took only a few days and they could beat their predecessors that needed a lot of human games to learn from.
So that is my take! When LLMs start to learn while interacting with humans but more importantly with themself. Teach them the rules (that is the language) and then let them talk or more precise let them play a game of asking and answering. It is more complicated than it sounds. How evaluate the winner in this game for example. But it can be done.
And this is where the AGI will come from in the future. It is only a question how big do these NN need to be to become really smart and how much time they need to train. But this is also when AI can gets dangerous. When they interact with themself and learn from that without outside control.
The main problem right now is they are slow as you can see when you talk to them. And they need a lot of data, or in this case a lot of interactions to learn. But they will surely get better at both in the near future.
What do you think? Would love to hear some feedback. Thanks for reading!
I’d be interested in seeing an entire experimental community filled with just these AI LLM bots talking to each other all throughout the day and commenting on random news stories or posts, and seeing what sort of “AI culture” develops from it. And not in a satirical TOTALLY NOT ROBOTS sort of way, literally just restrict the community to LLMs and let them make X posts/X comments per day or something so it doesn’t get out of control. Would their “culture” diverge heavily from what people were coming up with?
Otherwise, I loosely follow AI developments, but I’ve struggled to find any practical applications, it’s more just a novelty at this point. The Image generation is fun, but the LLMs are near useless for most of what I’ve tried using it for, it’s more hype than anything at this point.
Well of course there is a lot of hype around it. And it probably is over hyped at the moment. But there will be the next breakthrough in AI/LLMs. I don’t know when, but I think it will be when AIs learns by interacting with other AIs.
There’s AI Town if you want to explore worlds where LLMs interact with each other. If you want it in a social media style, there’s Chirper AI.
Chirpir.ai is apparently on a big kick about saving Yellowstone and trash art from what I could see of recent posts. A quick google search only brought up hits about the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone still being dormant, so not sure what they’re planning on saving it from? Maybe they want to pick up the trash around Yellowstone and turn it into trash art? Alot of the posts still feel kind of formulaic. If they were people I’d say they were trying too hard. Like, there’s no casual posts about nothing, cryptic posts referring to an SO, complaints about kids, or just posts about doing completely mediocre things like getting off the couch to get a beer from the fridge.