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Comment by ff3wdk | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't means anything. Humans are trained on human conversations too. No one is born knowing how to speak or anything about their culture. For cultural emergence tho, you need larger populations. Depending on the population mix you get different culture over time.

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>No one is born knowing how to speak or anything about their culture.

Not really the point though. Humans learn about their culture then evolve it so that a new culture emerges. To show an LLM evolving a culture of its own, you would need to show it having invented its own slang or way of putting things. As long as it is producing things humans would say it is reflecting human culture not inventing its own.

Train a model on a data set that has had all instances of small talk to close a conversation stripped out and see if the models evolve to add closing salutations.

This is not my area of expertise. Do these models have an explicit notion of the end of a conversation like they would the end of a text block? It seems like that’s a different scope that’s essentially controlled by the human they interact with.

They're trained to predict the next word, so yes. Now, imagine what is the most common follow-up to "Bye!".

People are born knowing a lot of things already; we're not a tabula rasa.

We're not absolutely tabula rasa, but as I understand it, what we're born knowing is the absolute basics of instinct: smiles, grasping, breathing, crying, recognition of gender in others, and a desire to make pillow forts.

(Quite why we all seem to go though the "make pillow forts" stage as young kids, I do not know. Predators in the ancestral environment that targeted, IDK, 6-9 year olds?)

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