Talking about large language models

Language Models Represent Space and Time , Wes Gurnee and Max Tegmark argue that “modern LLMs acquire structured knowledge about fundamental dimensions such as space and time, supporting the view that they learn not merely superficial statistics, but literal world models”, based on some analyses of the alleged capacity of LLMs to understand geograp... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more