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  • > this sentence has no proof

    As a programmer I was never impressed in such paradoxes. For me it was kinda obvious that in any sufficiently complex language you can create eqivalent of buggy infinite loop/recursion.

    by scotty79
  • A direction that is 99.99% accurate survives this argument completely. For all practical purposes one does not need totality.
    by ziofill
  • > Second, some people do really believe in a kind of platonic representation space that all models converge on, and that represents the “true” state of the world. If truth is indeed an objective part of the world, then you might expect such a universal truth direction to emerge as models get better. This

    This really sounds like all those scifi stories with people trying to find god in the computer. How could it be there, in the jumbled mirror of internet scraped texts.

    by tomaskafka
  • Aren't there definitions of Truth that are not the negation of Falsehood? Can't there be a function True(x) that is not equal to !False(x)? Can't there be a third function Paradox(x) such that these counterexamples can be considered paradoxes and therefore outside of the truth?

    I'm admittedly not a logician and don't formally study paradoxes, but I never quite understood the whole category of "this sentence is false" paradoxes, I feel that the sentence is paradox and therefore it's neither false nor true.

    I do agree that it's a truth vector sounds like a silly panacea fantasy, though. But more logical formality is not the counter argument that would convince me of it, rather I believe that there's less formal and rigorous ways to get closer to truth.

    by TZubiri
  • Title is a bit clickbaitish, but the content is well worth reading - came in with my pitchfork ready and left agreeing with basically all of it, with questions like ‘what if the probe could return 3 dimensions: truthfulness, knowledge confidence and decidability?’

    Also the observation that people treat LLMs like oracles when they’re everything but is spot on, something I’ve also been thinking about and it’s quite a bit scary.

    by baq
  • Fun, though as hinted at the end, the point of LLM "truth" probes is to measure the model's internal judgment of truthfulness. There's no reason this judgment, even if measured with 100% accuracy, couldn't be mistaken or logically inconsistent.
    by aesthesia
  • I think this article pushes the premise farther than is reasonable.

    The best anyone expects from an LLM "truth vector" is that it would encode the model's belief about whether the statement is true. Of course a perfect truth oracle is impossible.

    by Legend2440
  • > It might seem absurd to you to even suggest superhuman AIs could function as a truth-oracle (it certainly does to me), but there are two reasons to take it seriously. First, it is how these things will be used practically by the vast majority of people. They are already replacing standard Google search results, and I’ve had many discussions end with people delegating final authority on the truth to an AI.

    There are already organizations taking advantage of this, actively producing "AI propaganda", meaning propaganda aimed at the LLMs themselves in order to influence their understanding of what is truthful and bend it towards powerful actors' agendas. They're not even hiding the fact that they're doing this.

    by kstenerud

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