An LLM has no knowledge.
My calculator does not “know” that 2+2=4, it runs the code it has been programmed with which tells it to output 4. It has no knowledge or understanding of what it’s being asked to do, it just does what it is programmed to do.
An LLM is programmed to guess what a human would say if asked who the 4th president of the United States was. It runs the code that was developed with the training data to output the most likely response. Is it true? Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it sounds like something a human would say.
I trust the knowledge of my calculator more, because it was designed for giving factual correct responses.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
How do you know that George Washington is the first president? You weren’t around in 1784, you have no experiential knowledge, you only have declarative knowledge of it, you read it from a book or heard it from a person enough to repeat the fact when asked. You are guessing what your history teacher would have said in elementary school. Declaritive knowledge is just memory and repetition, and an LLM can do memory and repetition.
Whether an LLM can determine truth depends on your definition of truth. If truth can only be obtained from experience and reasoning from first principles then an LLM can’t determine truth. Then a statement like George Washington was the first president can’t be true then because you can’t derive it from experience or first principles, you weren’t there, no one alive was there. George Washington was the first president derives it’s validity and truth from the consensus of trustworthy people who say it’s true. An LLM can derive this sort of truth by determining the consensus of its training data assuming its training data is from trustworthy sources or the more trustworthy sources are more reinforced.