Yes, people speak multiple languages and switch between them. But it's a superficial analogy to the behavior of LLMs which do something different and for different reasons.

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vidarh a day ago | parent [-]

You're misrepresenting what I wrote. I specifically pointed out that I switch languages without intent to do so.

When you suggest that is a "superficial analogy" after you were the one pointing out LLMs switching language as something that sets them apart, you're seriously reaching.

I can often pinpoint afterward what was likely the trigger: E.g. I used a word that is the same in two languages, and continue in the second; I pronounced a word in its native language for whatever reason, and continued in that language; my "context" suddenly included another language because someone else spoke the other languages within earshot of me.

What makes you think this is materially different from an LLM switching language because its probability distribution gives a word in a different language because it fits in context?

In the examples I gave, each even made a word in the language I switched to more probable as a reasonable continuation, just as with an LLM.

I'm not claiming the mechanisms are identical, or even similar, but the behaviour most certainly is more similar than "a superficial analogy" would imply.

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jacobgold a day ago | parent [-]

That's a fair point. I agree that the behavior can look similar even when the mechanism is different.

But in practice, all the analogies I've seen are in fact superficial, including this one.

The LLM that abruptly switches languages will also likely switch to a wildly unrelated topic. If a human behaved that way, you'd call a doctor.

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Kim_Bruning a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's called "code-switching" or "code-mixing", and bilinguals do it all the time. When an immigrant kid does it, you don't call a doctor, you call it adorable.

By the way, it's not switching topic. You just pick the concept closest to what you mean from your combined vocabulary. If you're not paying close attention, you might switch language though (until the next concept you need is from the other language again, at which point you switch back)

And you're aware the paper "Attention is all you need" came out of machine translation research at Google, right? You hold an internal semantic representation and map in and out from arbitrary natural languages. I think the (bi-, tri-, multi-)lingual approach is the only proper way to translate, and this is a hill I will fight on!

Google may have gotten more than they bargained for on that particular translation experiment; though they failed to capitalize on it initially, with OpenAI running with the ball.

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vidarh a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of the time when I see an LLM abruptly switching languages it usually continues with something directly related to whatever triggered it.

I'm sure there are other failure modes where it may change topics too, just like humans also regularly digress when triggered by certain words etc.

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TeMPOraL a day ago | parent | prev [-]

What makes you think the similarity is the superficial part, and not the difference in mechanism? I'd argue it's the latter.

> The LLM that abruptly switches languages will also likely switch to a wildly unrelated topic. If a human behaved that way, you'd call a doctor.

Haven't met many kids, I see. Or even normie adults talking. I know plenty that tend to jump from topic to topic once they get into a stride talking, and they're not the ones diagnosed with ADHD.