What is Grog in the context of our conversation? You seem to admit at the end that LLMs are not really at all like Grog, in that Grog has no underlying bedrock of understanding, while modern LLMs do.
Grog understands some things (e.g. intuitive physics) but not others (e.g. pulsed lasers). Likewise, LLMs understand some things (e.g. pulsed lasers) but not others (e.g. some new field of science that hasn’t been invented yet). Right? We’re not at the end of history, where everything that can possibly be understood is already understood, and there’s nothing left.
If I hibernated you until the year 2100, and then woke you up and gave you a database with “actionable knowledge” from 1000 textbooks of [yet-to-be-invented fields of science], and asked you to engineer a state-of-the-art [device that no one today has even conceived of], then you would be just as helpless as Grog. You would have to learn the new fields until you understood them, which might take years, before you could even start on the task. This process involves changing the “weights” in your brain. I.e., you would need “real” learning. The database is not a replacement for that.
So think of it this way: there’s some set of things that are understood (by anyone), and that set of things is not increased via a system for pulling up facts from a database. Otherwise Grog would be able to immediately design LIDAR. And yet, humans are able to increase the set of things that are understood, over time. After all, “the set of things that are understood” sure is bigger today than it was 1000 years ago, and will be bigger still in 2100. So evidently humans are doing something very important that is entirely different from what can be done with database systems. And that thing is what I’m calling “real” continual learning.
Grog understands some things (e.g. intuitive physics) but not others (e.g. pulsed lasers). Likewise, LLMs understand some things (e.g. pulsed lasers) but not others (e.g. some new field of science that hasn’t been invented yet). Right? We’re not at the end of history, where everything that can possibly be understood is already understood, and there’s nothing left.
If I hibernated you until the year 2100, and then woke you up and gave you a database with “actionable knowledge” from 1000 textbooks of [yet-to-be-invented fields of science], and asked you to engineer a state-of-the-art [device that no one today has even conceived of], then you would be just as helpless as Grog. You would have to learn the new fields until you understood them, which might take years, before you could even start on the task. This process involves changing the “weights” in your brain. I.e., you would need “real” learning. The database is not a replacement for that.
So think of it this way: there’s some set of things that are understood (by anyone), and that set of things is not increased via a system for pulling up facts from a database. Otherwise Grog would be able to immediately design LIDAR. And yet, humans are able to increase the set of things that are understood, over time. After all, “the set of things that are understood” sure is bigger today than it was 1000 years ago, and will be bigger still in 2100. So evidently humans are doing something very important that is entirely different from what can be done with database systems. And that thing is what I’m calling “real” continual learning.