Related papers: Large Language Models and the Rationalist Empirici…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in evaluative processes, from information filtering to assessing and addressing knowledge gaps through explanation and credibility judgments. This raises the need to examine how such…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been making big waves in the machine learning community within the past few years. The impressive scalability of LLMs due to the advent of deep learning can be seen as a continuation of empiricist…

Causality is essential for understanding complex systems, such as the economy, the brain, and the climate. Constructing causal graphs often relies on either data-driven or expert-driven approaches, both fraught with challenges. The former…

Large language models (LLMs) are advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can perform a variety of tasks commonly found in human intelligence tests, such as defining words, performing calculations, and engaging in verbal…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. However, the rapid pace of their deployment has outpaced a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms…

As large language models (LLMs) enter the mainstream, aligning them to foster constructive dialogue rather than exacerbate societal divisions is critical. Using an individualized and multicultural alignment dataset of over 7,500…

Generative large language models (LLMs) are incredibly useful, versatile, and promising tools. However, they will be of most use to political and social science researchers when they are used in a way that advances understanding about real…

This paper proposes and argues for a counterintuitive thesis: the truly valuable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) reside precisely in the part that cannot be fully captured by human-readable discrete rules. The core argument is…

In this paper, the second of two companion pieces, we explore novel philosophical questions raised by recent progress in large language models (LLMs) that go beyond the classical debates covered in the first part. We focus particularly on…

Recent reports claim that Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved the ability to derive new science and exhibit human-level general intelligence. We argue that such claims are not rigorous scientific claims, as they do not satisfy…

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…

Whether large language models (LLMs) process language similarly to humans has been the subject of much theoretical and practical debate. We examine this question through the lens of the production-interpretation distinction found in human…

Large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning problems by first generating a rationale and then answering. We formalize reasoning as a latent variable model and derive a reward-based filtered expectation-maximization (FEM) objective for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown powerful performance and development prospects and are widely deployed in the real world. However, LLMs can capture social biases from unprocessed training data and propagate the biases to downstream…

The widespread success of large language models (LLMs) has been met with skepticism that they possess anything like human concepts or meanings. Contrary to claims that LLMs possess no meaning whatsoever, we argue that they likely capture…

Following the development of the selectionist theory of the immune system, there was an attempt to characterize many biological mechanisms as being "selectionist" as juxtaposed to "instructionist." But this broad definition would group…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like abilities in language-based tasks. While language is a defining feature of human intelligence, it emerges from more fundamental neurophysical processes rather than constituting the…

The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations -- known as inductive reasoning -- is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often…

We compare human and large language model (LLM) generalization in the number game, a concept inference task. Using a Bayesian model as an analytical framework, we examined the inductive biases and inference strategies of humans and LLMs.…

Daniel Dennett speculated in *Kinds of Minds* 1996: "Perhaps the kind of mind you get when you add language to it is so different from the kind of mind you can have without language that calling them both minds is a mistake." Recent work in…