this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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For the last time: these language models are just regurgitating what people have said. They don't analyze or reason.
That's not entirely true.
LLMs are trained to predict next word given context, yes. But in order to do that, they develop internal model that minimizes error across wide range of contexts - and emergent feature of this process is that the model DOES perform more than pure compression of the training data.
For example, GPT-3 is able to calculate addition and subtraction problems that didn't appear in the training dataset. This would suggest that the model learned how to perform addition and subtraction, likely because it was easier or more efficient than storing all of the examples from the training data separately.
This is a simple to measure example, but it's enough to suggests that LLMs are able to extrapolate from the training data and perform more than just stitch relevant parts of the dataset together.
That's interesting, I'd be curious to read more about that. Do you have any links to get started with? Searching this type of stuff on Google yields less than ideal results.
In my comment I've been referencing https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf, specifically section 3.9.1 where they summarize results of the arithmetic tasks.