Transformers

I recently read this classic test case in AI research: "the trophy didn't fit in the suitcase because it was too big." Simple question, does "it" mean the trophy or the suitcase?

I got it instantly. Trophy. Obviously, trophies are usually smaller than suitcases, so the thing that's "too big" has to be the trophy. I didn't read left to right and stop, I skipped past "didn't" and "the" without even noticing them, and went straight to weighing two words against each other, trophy versus suitcase, size versus size.

That instinct, reaching back across a sentence and deciding which words actually matter, is close to what's happening inside every AI model right now, including the one I was using to think this through. It's called attention. Every word in a sentence "looks" at every other word and decides how much to care about it. The model isn't reading in order, it's weighing.

Here's what stopped me. The model learned to do that by reading a trillion sentences. I did it after reading maybe one. My first reaction was, that's not understanding, that's brute-force memorization at a scale I can't even picture. Real understanding, I thought, comes with lived experience, with sensation, with actually having sympathy for a trophy that doesn't fit in a suitcase, not just scanning for patterns.

My instinct didn't come from nowhere either. I've seen trophies. I've packed suitcases. I've absorbed thousands of sentences shaped like that one, over an entire lifetime, without ever calling it training. So is my gut instinct actually that different from the model's pattern-matching, or is it the exact same trick, just running on a smaller, slower, more expensive dataset called my life?

Here's where I'm at.

The difference between me and the model isn't the pattern-matching itself. It's that I have the ability to reason. That's what lets me pay attention and make sense of information on gut instinct, not just match it. The model can weigh trophy against suitcase because it's seen the pattern before. I can weigh trophy against suitcase, or something it's never seen before, because I can reason my way there even without the pattern.

Instinct, for me, isn't the end of the process. It's reasoning happening fast enough that it feels automatic.