Wowed by a new paper I just read and wish I had thought to write myself. Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no:
It’s actually getting more scientific. Think of it like biology. We do a big study of an ml model or an organism and confirm a property of it.
It used to be it was just maths, you could spot an error in your code and fix it. Then it was a bag of hacks and you could keep just patching your model with more and more tweaks that didn’t have a solid theoretical basis but that improved performance.
Now it’s too big and too complex and we have to do science to understand the model limitations.