The latest generation of large language model (LLM) chatbots have made great strides and exhibit an impressive range of human-like abilities.
In the excitement surrounding these breakthroughs, people have imagined a future where these systems take over entire professions: drafting legal arguments, delivering medical diagnoses, managing complex engineering systems, and even making high-level policy decisions.
This has fuelled an enormous wave of interest, optimism, and in some cases, alarm. But it is important to understand that, like other artificial intelligences, they work in a completely different way to human intelligence.
The result is that although sometimes appearing human – perhaps even super-human – they can also behave strangely and fail catastrophically.
The inner workings of LLMs
A Large Language Model (LLM) can be thought of as a very powerful predictive text programme: given some text as input, the model predicts which word or words are most likely to come next….
