this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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It should be mentioned that those are language models trained on all kinds of text, not military specialists. They string together sentences that are plausible based on the input they get, they do not reason. These models mirror the opinions most commonly found in their training datasets. The issue is not that AI wants war, but rather that humans do, or at least the majority of the training dataset's authors do.
LLMs are trained to see parts of a document and reproduce the other parts, that's why they are called "language models".
For example, they might learn that the words "strawberries are" are often followed by the words "delicious", "red", or "fruits", but never by the words "airplanes", "bottles" or "are".
Likewise, they learn to mimic reasoning contained in their training data. They learn the words and structures involved in an argument, but they also learn the conclusions they should arrive at. If the training dataset consists of 80 documents arguing for something, and 20 arguing against it (assuming nothing else differentiates those documents (like length etc.)), the LLM will adopt the standpoint of the 80 documents, and argue for that thing. If those 80 documents contain flawed logic, so will the LLM's reasoning.
Of course, you could train a LLM on a carefully curated selection of only documents without any logical fallacies. Perhaps, such a model might be capable of actual logical reasoning (though it would still be biased by the conclusions contained in the training dataset)
But to train an LLM you need vasts amount of data. Filtering out documents containing flawed logic does not only require a lot of effort, it also reduces the size of the training dataset.
Of course, that is exactly what the big companies are currently researching and I am confident that LLMs will only get better over time, but the LLMs of today are trained on large datasets rather than perfect ones, and their architecture and training prioritize language modelling, not logical reasoning.
People need to realise that LLMs are not just Markov chains, the math is far more complex than just guessing which word comes next - they have structure where concepts come before word choice, this is why they can very clearly be seen making novel structures such as code.
LLMs are absolutely complex, neural nets ARE somewhat modelled after human brains after all, and trying to understand transformers or LSTMs for the first time is a real pain. However, what a NN can do, or rather what it has been trained to do depends almost entirely on the loss function used. The complexity of the architecture and the training dataset don't change what a LLM can do, only how good it is at doing that, and how well it generalizes. The loss function used for the training of LLMs simply evaluates whether the predicted tokens fit the actual ones. That means that an LLM is trained to predict words from other words, or in other words, to model language.
The loss function does not evaluate the validity of logical statements, though. All reasoning that an LLM is capable of, or seems to be capable of, emerges from its modelling of language, not an actual understanding of logic.