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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3297 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmxzr2zsjNtjaHh7x/actually-othello-gpt-has-a-linear-emergent-world

The headline result is that Othello-GPT learns an emergent world representation - despite never being explicitly given the state of the board, and just being tasked to predict the next move, it learns to compute the state of the board at each move.

IMO, LLMs are "just" trying to predict the next token, the same way humans are "just" trying to pass on our genes. It does not preclude LLMs having an internal world model, and I suspect they actually do.

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