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Okay, I assumed you meant character-level edit distance, because that's what the article you linked was exclusively about. But without that, 'edit distance' isn't really a useful term, as we don't know what a 'primitive operation' is in the context of a LLM because we do not know that much if anything about what they actually do internally.
Based on what I've seen, 'most similar example in training set' doesn't capture the extent to which LLMs memorize things. Even if they are memorizing a lot, it's memorization in a very complicated way - otherwise the 'write a story about X in the style of Y', where X and Y hadn't ever been done before, just wouldn't work.
how is this memorizing? or this? Like, there's some extent to which it's memorizing things more than humans do, certainly. But it's a very vague sense, and positing a metric like edit distance that fully captures that sense just restates the problem, because we don't know what that is
That isn’t true, the formal definition doesn’t restrict what operations there are (if you disagree then you should quote it and tell me where), it just requires that they be operations on strings. Whatever else using Google Translate is, it’s an operation on strings.
I’m not suggesting that we base primitive operations on what the LLM does internally. Your initial example wasn’t about what the LLM does internally, it was about “what if the LLM ran things through Google Translate a few times to trick you.” I’m saying you could supplement a more basic measure with additional operations to capture when the model has access to external programs like Google Translate.
I never said that the AI was just “memorizing” things, that’s an obvious strawman. All I said was that edit distance would help you tell how much the AI was paraphrasing from its training set, which doesn’t presuppose that it’s not paraphrasing very little. You seem to have misinterpreted me as saying that an edit distance would show the AI was paraphrasing a lot, when all I said was an edit distance would be a helpful metric of how much it was. I didn’t make any specific commitments about how much that would be across a wide range of cases. Nor did I suggest that an edit distance would fully capture things, just that it would give a good sense of how close things were.
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