Well that’s why its ‘latent’ knowledge. And I’m not thinking about deductive truth so much as the possibility of a new epistemological position that uh.. just takes a sufficiently large models word for it.
A formal definition of ‘common knowledge’ or ‘common sense’?
“Anything that would be regarded as true by a language model trained on the Common Crawl dataset”.
Be an interesting philosophical position to test out in, say, a judicial setting. We could replace the legal concept of a ‘reasonable person’ with ‘a language model with its temperature set to a reasonable level’.
And perhaps instead of a jury of your peers, the fairest way to reach a verdict would be to present the facts of a case to a large language model, and ask it ’guilty or not guilty?’ twelve times..
> just takes a sufficiently large models word for it
The renaissance and enlightenment happened because we stopped doing this. The church was that era’s big model, and doctrine was similarly impenetrably complex and indecipherable. You’d just take the church’s word for something.
The medieval church used to be much more about esoteric doctrine and strange theological reasoning than I think most people realize. It was both complicated and nonsensical; different traditions had different levels of complexity, and many were notoriously convoluted. Byzantine life centered around theology and the overcomplicated bureaucratic state dependent on it to such an extent the word “byzantine” became synonymous with impossible to reason about complexity. While the way in which AI works involves much more rigor and empiricism and has wildly different principles at its foundations and observable results, I’d argue it’s similarly impossible to reason about. What brought about the scientific revolution was a rigorous deference to simplification wherever possible. The convoluted orbits with Earth at the center “worked”, but were much more complex. Our deference to complex convoluted statistical models where the underlying natural rules and phenomenon at play aren’t explicitly identified seems like a step backwards in terms of creating more actual knowledge to me (although the practical utility and the opportunities to refine outputs into new knowledge discoveries are massive)
And I realize what I was replying to was a hypothetical/not a serious proposition right now, but people seem very eager to push towards a future in which we defer to more advanced versions of these things without much additional thought. I think that’d be a major mistake.
