[HN Gopher] Are language models good at making predictions? ___________________________________________________________________ Are language models good at making predictions? Author : RationalDino Score : 5 points Date : 2023-11-07 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com) | pk-protect-ai wrote: | They are excellent predictors of what they have been taught to | predict: composing text in different languages. They are so | proficient at these predictions that it is challenging to | distinguish LLMs text from human-written text. As a byproduct of | learning from Common Crawl, they are adept at predicting average | "internet-human" behavior, leading to phenomena such as "Sydney". | Their predictive capabilities are so impressive that you can play | chess with them and find a formidable opponent. Despite never | having seen anything beyond the text in their training data, they | demonstrate spatial comprehension. They are universal | approximators... | RationalDino wrote: | Yes. The fact that they are so good at these things is why we | might reasonably ask how good they are at making predictions | about the world. | | The fact that their predictions are not particularly good is | therefore of interest. | IanCal wrote: | It feels a shame to do this and cram it all into one response, | formatted in JSON. That doesn't really give them much room to | think. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-07 23:00 UTC)