Well that’s why its ‘latent’ knowledge. And I’m not thinking about deductive truth so much as the possibility of a new epistemological position that uh.. just takes a sufficiently large models word for it.
“Anything that would be regarded as true by a language model trained on the Common Crawl dataset”.
Be an interesting philosophical position to test out in, say, a judicial setting. We could replace the legal concept of a ‘reasonable person’ with ‘a language model with its temperature set to a reasonable level’.
And perhaps instead of a jury of your peers, the fairest way to reach a verdict would be to present the facts of a case to a large language model, and ask it ’guilty or not guilty?’ twelve times..
The renaissance and enlightenment happened because we stopped doing this. The church was that era’s big model, and doctrine was similarly impenetrably complex and indecipherable. You’d just take the church’s word for something.
We’re going backwards.
> We’re going backwards.
...it was an off the cuff hypothetical.
And I realize what I was replying to was a hypothetical/not a serious proposition right now, but people seem very eager to push towards a future in which we defer to more advanced versions of these things without much additional thought. I think that’d be a major mistake.