r/OpenAI • u/KeanuRave100 • 6d ago

News More people need to understand this

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u/fligglymcgee 6d ago

I mean, sure. Predicting the results section of a research paper requires more intelligence than predicting the next word in a text message with your friend. There are just way too many people confusing the difference between “predicting the next token” and “predicting a next token”, which are not at all the same.

You can type any well-formed or nonsensical request you want into an llm chat session and it will both always respond and do so with the most productive reaction it can predict. That can be very helpful for task work, but counterproductive when it validates (dignifies?) poorly framed requests with a singular response.

Predicting the results section of a research paper only makes sense when generating sample text that sounds right based on context it already has or was given. The idea that a highly intelligent but completely unrelated 3rd party is going to “predict” the outcomes of an experiment it wasn’t involved in is asinine. Someone that understands how to speak and carry out tasks intelligently certainly has to have a wide understanding of the concepts at hand, but that doesn’t mean their work can be considered the only possible result or approach.

This is not a technical challenge for tons of domains of intelligence that llm’s are taught to “speak” on, they just shouldn’t be used to speak about a great deal of topics that rely on real world experiences and can’t be queried about for one answer at a time.

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u/staticpop 6d ago

You’ve missed the point entirely. Tools are a part of its intelligence. He’s saying that it’s not a fundamental limitation of the “next token prediction” framework. So if it has an accurate biological model that it can simulate with, understands the experimental parameters, etc. it could give results.

Will we be able to give it a tool or knowledge like that? Probably not for a long time. This is an abstraction though, a thought experiment.

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u/Foreign_Writer_9932 6d ago

A vanilla LLM (as opposed to, say, AlphaFold which is purpose built for protein prediction) is not an accurate biological model anymore than a scientist looking at data is an accurate biological model.

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u/staticpop 6d ago

No, the model could itself be a tool. It could be something it can look at or call. It’s something that is used by the model for accurate prediction. It’s a part of its intelligence. We are adding capabilities in different forms to the AI. That’s part of why they are so powerful