That settled this question for me.
Language, as a problem, doesn’t have a discrete solution like the question of whether a list is sorted or not.
Seems weird to compare one to the other, unless I’m misunderstanding something.
What’s more, the entire notion of a sorted list was provided to the LLM by how you organized your training data.
I don’t know the details of your experiment, but did you note whether the lists were sorted ascended or descended?
Did you compare which kind of sorting was most common in the output and in the training set?
Your bias might have snuck in without you knowing.
For this hypothesis: The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.
And yes, the notion was provided by the training data. It indeed had to learn that notion from the data, rather than parrot memorized lists or excerpts from the training set, because the problem space is too vast and the training set too small to brute force it.
The output lists were sorted in ascending order, the same way that I generated them for the training data. The sortedness is directly verifiable without me reading between the lines to infer something that isn't really there.
If every pair of digits appears sorted in the dataset, then that could still be “just” a stochastic parrot.
I’m kind of interested to see if an LLM can sort when the dataset specifically omits comparisons between certain pairs of numbers.
Also I don’t think OC was responding to commenters, but the article
But by specifically avoiding certain cases, wet could verify if the model is generalizing or not.
As for avoiding certain cases, that could be done to some extent. But remember that the untrained transformer has no preconception of numbers or ordering (it doesn't use the hardware ALU or integer data type) so there has to be enough data in the training set to learn 0<1<2<3<4<5<6, etc.
This is the kind of thing I’d want it to generalize.
If I avoid having 2 and 6 in the same unsorted list in the training set, will sets containing those numbers be correctly sorted in the same list in the test set and at the same rate as other lists.
My intuition is that, yes, it would. But it’d be nice to see and would be a clear demonstration of the ability to generalize at all.
It is nothing new and has been well established in the literature since the 90s.
The shared article really is not worth the read and mostly uncovers an author who does not know what he write about.
LLMs didn’t exist in then. Attention only came out in 2017…
The network itself can be trained to solve most functions (or all, I forget precisely if NNs can solve all functions)
But the language model is not necessarily capable of solving all functions, because it was already trained on language.