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You can judge the truth and falsity of its output without caring a whit about how it produces those outputs.


Koan like question that may have no answer:

If language communicates thoughts, thoughts have a relationship with reality, and that relationship might be true or false or something else.

Then what thought is LLM language communicating, to what reality does it bear a relationship, and what is the truth or falseness of that language?

To me, LLM generated sentences have no truth or false value, they are strings, literally, not thoughts.

Take the simple "user:how much is two plus two? assistant: two plus two is four". It may seem trivial, but how do ascertain that that statement maps to 2+2=4? Do you make a leap of faith or argue that the word plus maps to the adding function? What about is, does it map to equality? Even if they are the same tokens as water is wet (where wet is not water?). Or are we arguing that the truthfulness lies on the embedding interpretation? Where now tokens and strings merely communicate the multidim embedding space, which could be said to be a thought, now we are mapping some of the vectors in that space as true, and some as false?


A part of an answer:

Lets assume LLMs don't "think". We feed an LLM an input and get back an output string. It is then possible to interpret that string as having meaning in the same way we interpret human writing as having meaning, even though we may choose not to. At that point, we have created a thought in our heads which could be true or false.

Now lets talk about calculators. We can think of calculators as similar to LLMs, but speaking a more restricted language and giving significantly more reliable results. The calculator takes a thought converted to a string as input from the user, and outputs a string, which the user then converts to a thought. The user values that string creating a thought which has a higher truthiness. People don't like buggy calculators.

I'd say one can view an LLM in exactly the same way, just that they can take a much richer language of thoughts, but output significantly buggier results.




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