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I take the ‘opposite’ view that LLMs are becoming extraordinary intelligences, but I also think the distinction between memory, recall, training set, database etc is unnecessarily importing computer science distinctions into what is a relatively robust colloquial understanding of these models.
If you watch three thousand chess games and then play a chess game and see a move and think “I’ve seen this before, I’m going to do x” and you’re right but you can’t perfectly recall that it was actually a YouTube video of a 2003 Chess regional championship quarter final between… then are you recalling or remembering or did you learn?
This is just not a relevant distinction when it comes to the human concept of memory. I’ll keep pushing this because “actually, an LLM doesn’t have memory of the training set” isn’t really true. It often does have recall of the training set, just like often you really might be able to remember the book you first saw an unusual turn of phrase in or the chess game where you first saw a particular move. And in any case, memory encompasses both that and a relational, situational, partial and often metadata-free recall but it still counts.
The counterargument here isn’t “no LLMs don’t do this”, it’s “so do you”.
This doesn't exist, at least on this forum on down. There's at least one person I talked to who really thought that LLMs were looking through the training data at inference time. It turns out that people using sloppy language ""colloquially"" ("joke's on you, I was only pretending to misunderstand LLMs") can cause people to believe the literal meaning if they don't know any better.
Agreed.
This isn't what I said. I said it doesn't have access to the training set, in the same way that if you take an exam without "access" to the textbook you're not allowed to bring it in and leaf through it when answering the problems. It doesn't preclude you from reading the textbook a thousand times and memorizing it verbatim though.
Again, if we change “it accesses the training set” to “it recalls / accesses / understands [delete as appropriate] the conceptual relationships represented by the training set” what really changes?
What changes is that one is completely wrong and the other is defensible. One leads you to think that an LLM recognizing Shakespeare (or a lesser author) from a sample of writing is an unremarkable feat, an information retrieval problem that's been solved for forty years. The other causes you to realize that what's going on here is much deeper.
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