• @UnpluggedFridge@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    -86 months ago

    How do hallucinations preclude an internal representation? Couldn’t hallucinations arise from a consistent internal representation that is not fully aligned with reality?

    I think you are misunderstanding the role of tokens in LLMs and conflating them with internal representation. Tokens are used to generate a state, similar to external stimuli. The internal representation, assuming there is one, is the manner in which the tokens are processed. You could say the same thing about human minds, that the representation is not located anywhere like a piece of data; it is the manner in which we process stimuli.

    • @dustyData@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      13
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Not really. Reality is mostly a social construction. If there’s not an other to check and bring about meaning, there is no reality, and therefore no hallucinations. More precisely, everything is a hallucination. As we cannot cross reference reality with LLMs and it cannot correct itself to conform to our reality. It will always hallucinate and it will only coincide with our reality by chance.

      I’m not conflating tokens with anything, I explicitly said they aren’t an internal representation. They’re state and nothing else. LLMs don’t have an internal representation of reality. And they probably can’t given their current way of working.

      • @UnpluggedFridge@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        0
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        You seem pretty confident that LLMs cannot have an internal representation simply because you cannot imagine how that capability could emerge from their architecture. Yet we have the same fundamental problem with the human brain and have no problem asserting that humans are capable of internal representation. LLMs adhere to grammar rules, present information with a logical flow, express relationships between different concepts. Is this not evidence of, at the very least, an internal representation of grammar?

        We take in external stimuli and peform billions of operations on them. This is internal representation. An LLM takes in external stimuli and performs billions of operations on them. But the latter is incapable of internal representation?

        And I don’t buy the idea that hallucinations are evidence that there is no internal representation. We hallucinate. An internal representation does not need to be “correct” to exist.

        • @dustyData@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Yet we have the same fundamental problem with the human brain

          And LLMs aren’t human brains, they don’t even work remotely similarly. An LLM has more in common with an Excel spreadsheet than with a neuron. Read on the learning models and pattern recognition theories behind LLMs, they are explicitly designed to not function like humans. So we cannot assume that the same emergent properties exist on an LLM.

            • @dustyData@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              16 months ago

              That’s not how science works. You are the one claiming it does, you have the burden of proof to prove they have the same properties. Thus far, assuming they don’t as they aren’t human is the sensible rational route.

              • @UnpluggedFridge@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                0
                edit-2
                6 months ago

                Read again. I have made no such claim, I simply scrutinized your assertions that LLMs lack any internal representations, and challenged that assertion with alternative hypotheses. You are the one that made the claim. I am perfectly comfortable with the conclusion that we simply do not know what is going on in LLMs with respect to human-like capabilities of the mind.