>A model doesn’t “know” facts or measure uncertainty in a Bayesian sense. All it really does is traverse a high‑dimensional statistical manifold of language usage, trying to produce the most plausible continuation.
And is that that different than what we do under the scenes? Is there a difference between an actual fact vs some false information stored in our brain? Or both have the same representation in some kind of high‑dimensional statistical manifold in our brains, and we also "try to produce the most plausible continuation" using them?
There might be one major difference is at a different level: what we're fed (read, see, hear, etc) we also evaluate before storing. Does LLM training do that, beyond some kind of manually assigned crude "confidence tiers" applied to input material during training (e.g. trust Wikipedia more than Reddit threads)?
I would say it's very different to what we do. Go to a friend and ask them a very niche question. Rather than lie to you, they'll tell you "I don't know the answer to that". Even if a human absorbed every single bit of information a language model has, their brain probably could not store and process it all. Unless they were a liar, they'd tell you they don't know the answer either! So I personally reject the framing that it's just like how a human behaves, because most of the people I know don't lie when they lack information.
>Go to a friend and ask them a very niche question. Rather than lie to you, they'll tell you "I don't know the answer to that"
Don't know about that, bullshitting is a thing. Especially online, where everybody pretends to be an expert on everything, and many even believe it.
But even if so, is that because of some fundamental difference between how a human and an LLM store/encode/retrieve information, or more because it has been instilled into a human through negative reinforcement (other people calling them out, shame of correction, even punishment, etc) not to make things up?
And is that that different than what we do under the scenes? Is there a difference between an actual fact vs some false information stored in our brain? Or both have the same representation in some kind of high‑dimensional statistical manifold in our brains, and we also "try to produce the most plausible continuation" using them?
There might be one major difference is at a different level: what we're fed (read, see, hear, etc) we also evaluate before storing. Does LLM training do that, beyond some kind of manually assigned crude "confidence tiers" applied to input material during training (e.g. trust Wikipedia more than Reddit threads)?