alt Hacker NewsI wish people would do even the most basic amount of research into LLMs before opining about what they can or cannot do. There are very principled reasons why LLMs do not know how many letters are in words, and it says nothing about their facility for understanding meaning.
Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to words or letters, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'. It has trouble distinguishing features that are "sub-token" like specific letter sequences because it doesn't see letter sequences but just the token as a single atomic unit. 'Straw' and 'r' are two tokens but an LLM is entirely blind to the fact that 'straw' has one 'r' in it.
As an analogy, I might ask you to identify the relative activations of each of the three cone types on your retina as I present some solid color image to your eyes. But of course you can't do this, you simply do not have cognitive access to that information. Individual color experiences are your basic vision tokens.
The widespread mistake people keep making is assuming the development of intelligence in LLMs should follow the same trajectory that human intelligence takes as it develops into adult levels of intelligence. Thus deficiency in some capacity that we take for granted in humans is an indictment on LLM intelligence. But this is specious. LLMs are entirely alien; their developmental paths do not and should not look anything like ours. Your intuition from human intelligence just works against understanding the potential for intelligence in LLMs.
Replies
>The widespread mistake people keep making is assuming the development of intelligence in LLMs should follow the same trajectory that human intelligence takes as it develops into adult levels of intelligence.
To be fair, almost everyone who claims LLMs are conscious tends to claim that they are conscious in exactly the way that humans are, to the point of stating that human brains are also just complex next-token prediction machines with a random seed. It's basically religious arguments on both sides.
> There are very principled reasons why LLMs do not know how many letters are in words, and it says nothing about their facility for understanding meaning. … Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to words or letters, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'.
This sounds like a description of a child who has not learned to read yet. You ask a child who is not aware of the alphabet and of "words" how many r's are in strawberry you'd get a non-sense answer too. So what you're really pointing out is that the LLMs have not been trained on "the english language" and how words are constructed and what they are composed of. That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word. It's not that I know how many r's are in strawberry because of how I'm understanding the word "strawberry", I know how many r's are in strawberry because I know how to spell strawberry. The LLM needs to be trained on this the same way someone who is learning to read would be trained on it. No one should be surprised that an LLM can't "read" in the same way no one should be surprised that a child can't "read".