So-called “emergent” behavior in LLMs may not be the breakthrough that researchers think.
What always irks me about those “emergent behavior” articles: no one ever really defines what those amazing"skills" are supposed to be.
One of those things I remember reading was the ability of ChatGPT to translate texts. It was trained with texts in multiple languages, but never translation specifically. Still, it’s quite good at it.
That is just its core function doing its thing transforming inputs to outputs based on learned pattern matching.
It may not have been trained on translation explicitly, but it very much has been trained on these are matching stuff via its training material. Since you know what its training set most likely contained… dictionaries. Which is as good as asking it to learn translation. Another stuff most likely in training data: language course books, with matching translated sentences in them. Again well you didnt explicitly tell it to learn to translate, but in practice the training data selection did it for you.
The data is there, but simpler models just couldn’t do it, even when trained with that data.
Bilingual human children also often can’t translate between their two (or more) native languages until they get older.
That’s interesting. My trilingual kids definitely translate individual words, but I guess the real bar here is to translate sentences such that the structure is correct for the languages?
TLDR: Let’s say you want to teach an LLM a new skill. You give them training data pertaining to that skill. Currently, researchers believe that this skill development shows up suddenly in a breakthrough fashion. They think so because they measure this skill using some methods. The skill levels remain very low until they unpredictably jump up like crazy. This is the “breakthrough”.
BUT, the paper that this article references points at flaws in the methods of measuring skills. This paper suggests that breakthrough behavior doesn’t really exist and skill development is actually quite predictable.
Also, uhhh I’m not AI (I see that TLDR bot lurking everywhere, which is what made me specify this).
Also, uhhh I’m not AI
An AI would say that… 😂
Clearly, the AI is learning deception
what material benefit does having a cutesy representation of phrenology, a pseudoscience used to justify systematic racism, bring to this article or discussion?
