Adam Marblestone: belief

Transcript context

…So let me ask you about this. You guys are funding different groups that are trying to figure out what’s up in the brain. If we had a perfect representation, however you define it, of the brain, why think it would actually let us figure out the answer to these questions? We have neural networks which are way more interpretable, not just because we understand what’s in the weight matrices, but because there are weight matrices. There are these boxes with numbers in them. Even then we can tell very basic things. We can kind of see circuits for very basic pattern matching of following one token with another. I feel like we don’t really have an explanation of why LLMs are intelligent just because they’re interpretable. I think I would somewhat dispute it. We have some description of what the LLM is fundamentally doing. What that’s doing is that I have an architecture and I have a learning rule and I have hyperparameters and I have initialization and I have training data. But those are things we learned because we built them, not because we interpreted them from seeing the weights. The analogous thing to connectome is like seeing the weights.…

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