GLENDOWE: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?
I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?
Chances are much higher than a model can figure out what the patterns are, decipher them, and retain that knowledge in a meaningful way it can reason about. Me and you might take years or months to do all of that on our own, with a "map" of the weight we might be able to discuss it, but not as effortlessly as an LLM.
Honestly, I had told a few different colleagues that reading a model is probably not that exclusive to frontier models. It's probably yet another reason OpenAI / Anthropic don't release any big open weight models, but thankfully Google and Microsoft release reasonably sized models. Imagine a new GPT open weight release, it would get dissected drastically.
In 1 Samuel, King Saul visits a medium in Endor in order to speak to the (dead) prophet Samuel. Human dead go to Shoel (in familiar terms, it is similar to the Greek underworld) in the Old Testament. Later on in the New Testament, the idea of a really really bad place is introduced in the form of Tartarus, which is specifically where the rebelling angels were sent. But that is not the same place human dead go.
The idea that everything "not Heaven" must be Hell is an invention, caused mostly by dogma that rose from bad translations of the Greek and Hebrew in the middle ages (for example, King James - itself mostly correcting minor errors of the older Bishop's Bible - refers to all of it as Hell even though the original text most inarguably refers to different places different beings go).
Jesus clearly refers to a very unpleasant place in e.g. Mark 9:47–48[1], Luke 16:24,[2] and Matthew 25:41[3] (where it's explicitly stated that false prophets will go to the same place as "the devil and his angels"). Other references to an unambiguously bad place, as the sole and final destination of unbelievers, are throughout the New Testament, e.g. the "lake of fire" in Revelation 20:15[4] and 21:8[5]. Revelation 20:14[6] even says that "Hades" will be thrown into that same "lake of fire" (which of course supports what you're saying about Hades being distinct from Hell). As a final note, even the reference to Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4 speaks of it as a temporary holding place where "angels who sinned" are being "kept for judgment", implying that there's a more final fate awaiting them (identified in Revelation 20:10[7], at least for Satan, as the aforementioned "lake of fire").
The main point I'm trying to make is that, while it's certainly true there are other "places where dead people/angels go" than Heaven and Hell, that's only true at this point in time. To my knowledge, the New Testament is consistent about a final judgment where there are only two possible fates (the New Jerusalem, i.e. Heaven, and the lake of fire, i.e. Hell).
[0] "For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but cast them into the pit [Tartarus] and delivered them to chains of darkness, being kept for judgment;"
[1] "And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell [Gehenna], where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."
[2] "And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’"
[3] "Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;"
[4] "And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
[5] "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and sexually immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."
[6] "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire."
[7] "And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever."
Why do this without testing? Why would you assume that?
Isn't that what this whole technology paradigm is about? How is it surprising?
Granted, it is cool. But I see so much of "look at this cool thing I did with LLMs" and honestly... we need more structured text, more explicit documentation, more ergonomic and intuitive CRUD applications.
The amount of "look at cool things" is growing way faster than before and they are all sort of low effort now because the "agentic" LLM-VM looping apparatus can do a lot of heavy lifting and run with our prompts.
And I mean, if one has jargon, knowledge, and intention, they can also leverage that into great structured text, ergonomic and intuitive CRUD apps etc, all of which add great value to our mundane pursuits of applied research, software products and services and so on.
Honestly, I begin to think the problem is people dazzling themselves instead of doing the housekeeping that is the bulk of life. Technology choice is entirely secondary.
But frontier AI can work out math and of course this is all just...math. So I imagine given enough time + testing and probing that it could work out what each weight does/influences and trace all the pathways.
And presumably this means that it would be possible to train a model to interpret weights as current models interpret human language although our language remains pretty constant, even different quants of the same model will experience enough change to mean no real basis for training a model to do that.
But I suppose it would surely be possible to train a model to interpret the weights in a generic "these are weights for an MLP" way? But then if I give a partial sentence from the middle of a book, you can pretty effectively guess what's going on locally but perhaps not globally. If I give you a chunk of loosely correlated weights from the center of a model...I feel like that's much, much more difficult but that the same applies?
In TFA case, given that they were able to guess what the weights did (which the researchers knew in advance and could cross-check) and to even tweak and improve them, the answer is yes.