philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How AI Knows Things No One Told It

... A growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does, though the machines’ technique is different. ...

The code for these programs is relatively simple and fills just a few screens. ...

Few had expected a fairly straightforward autocorrection algorithm to acquire such broad abilities. ...

Although an LLM runs on a computer, it is not itself a computer. It lacks essential computational elements, such as working memory. ... Instead he hypothesizes that the machine improvised a memory by harnessing its mechanisms for interpreting words according to their context—a situation similar to how nature repurposes existing capacities for new functions. ...

Researchers marvel at how much LLMs are able to learn from text. ... When they see the word “red,” they process it not just as an abstract symbol but as a concept that has certain relationship to maroon, crimson, fuchsia, rust, and so on. ...

By the time you type a query into ChatGPT, the network should be fixed; unlike humans, it should not continue to learn. So it came as a surprise that LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users’ prompts—an ability known as “in-context learning.” “It’s a different sort of learning that wasn’t really understood to exist before,” says Ben Goertzel, founder of the AI company SingularityNET. ...

Entire websites are devoted to “jailbreak” prompts that overcome the system’s “guardrails”—restrictions that stop the system from telling users how to make a pipe bomb, for example—typically by directing the model to pretend to be a system without guardrails. Some people use jailbreaking for sketchy purposes, yet others deploy it to elicit more creative answers. ... [PhilNote: this is how writers will use AI to write better plots involving stopping clever bad guys.] ...

See the full article here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-ai-knows-things-no-one-told-it/