alt Hacker News> I push them to their limits and have definitely witnessed novel output.
I’m quite curious what these novel outputs are. I imagine the entire world would like to know of an LLM producing completely, never-before-created outputs which no human has ever thought before.
Here is where I get completely hung up. Take 2+2. An LLM has never had 2 groups of two items and reached the enlightenment of 2+2=4
It only knows that because it was told that. If enough people start putting 2+2=3 on the internet who knows what the LLM will spit out. There was that example a ways back where an LLM would happily suggest all humans should eat 1 rock a day. Amusingly, even _that_ wasn’t a novel idea for the LLM, it simply regurgitated what it scraped from a website about humans eating rocks. Which leads to the crux: how much patently false information have LLMs scraped that is completely incorrect?
This is not a correct approximation of what happens inside an LLM. They form probabilistic logical circuits which approximate the world they have learned through training. They are not simply recalling stored facts. They are exploiting organically-produced circuitry, walking a manifold, which leads to the ability to predict the next state in a staggering variety of contexts.
As an example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217
It's not hard to imagine that a sufficiently developed manifold could theoretically allow LLMs to interpolate or even extrapolate information that was missing from the training data, but is logically or experimentally valid.