> These models are the only other things we've ever met that can hold a conversation, and they're made out of weights
Is a fair point.
Parrots are intelligent animals, albeit with a limited capacity for vocabulary and syntax compared to a human, and Eliza and the flowchart are made out of explicitly encoded rules and conversational tactics.
There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer.
There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177
The point of the original short story is that the computational substrate doesn't matter when you have Turing completeness. This one seems to think that you don't need structure and interpretability just because you change substrates.
The tokenizer is, at best, a sensory mechanism as evidenced by 1) the random generation of the tokenization scheme, and 2) vastly different tokenization schemes produce virtually identical behavior. It'd be like if Noah Webster threw a bunch of movable type into a bucket (breaking some words in half) and then drew randomly to make the first English dictionary.
So when I way that the grok paper and the pong paper fundamentally agree I have some idea of what I'm talking about.
https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
And they're made out of weights.
turtleyacht•1h ago