philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

I’ve Seen How AI ‘Thinks.’ I Wish Everyone Could.

... In my experience, AI works best when I can touch the guts of the model I’m using, when I can feel around for the training data, visualize the math that gives it its structure and tweak the code that generates its outputs.

Most users of large language models don’t get this opportunity, since AI companies don’t make it easy—or even possible....

Plotting words in a “vector space” makes it possible for an LLM to detect the connections among them: Distance is an easily computable property in a vector space, and closeness encapsulates relationships. ...

A (very simplified) language model would “read” these lines by running through them again and again, each time “hiding” one word from itself and trying to guess how it should fill in the blank. After each pass, the model would assess how far off its guess was from the correct word, tweak its calculations and try again. ...

When we find that, to a model, an angry fruit is really a vegetable, ... . We learn, in short, how the model thinks. ...

For every dollar that AI companies pump into computing power to make their models bigger, why not spend a penny on explaining how those models work? Open up the training data. Make programming “playgrounds” where model parameters can be tweaked. Let us traverse vector space hand-in-hand with our machines.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ive-seen-how-ai-thinks-i-wish-everyone-could-41c81370